Ground-Work

English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science

Hillary Eklund

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780820704999
• eBook ISBN: 9780271093529
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism & Nature
• Index: Literature

How does soil, as an ecological element, shape culture? With the sixteenth-century shift in England from an agrarian economy to a trade economy, what changes do we see in representations of soil as reflected in the language and stories during that time? This collection brings focused scholarly attention to conceptions of soil in the early modern period, both as a symbol and as a feature of the physical world, aiming to correct faulty assumptions that cloud our understanding of early modern ecological thought: that natural resources were then poorly understood and recklessly managed, and that cultural practices developed in an adversarial relationship with natural processes. Moreover, these essays elucidate the links between humans and the lands they inhabit, both then and now.

Table of contents

• COVER Front
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Compost/Composition
• Chapter 2: Richard Carew and the Matters of the Littoral
• Chapter 3: Visions of Soil and Body Management The Almanac in Richard II
• Chapter 4: Unsoiled Soil and“Fleshly Slime” Representations of Reproduction in Spenser’s Legend of Chastity
• Chapter 5: Groping Golgotha: Soil Improvement in the Towneley and Chester Shepherds’ Plays
• Chapter 6: Winstanley and Postrevolutionary Soil
• Chapter 7: Fertility versus Firepower Shakespeare’s Contested Soil Ecologies
• Chapter 8: Wetlands Reclamation and the Fate of the Local in Seventeenth Century England
• Chapter 9: Manuring Eden Biological Conversions in Paradise Lost
• Notes
• Notes to Introduction
• Bibliography
• Index