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“The Business of the Earth” Edward Thomas and Ecocentrism
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Published:December 1996
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Abstract
Modernism and Marxism fetishize the city, but in different ways. The one neglects “nature poetry” as having refused a cognitive and aesthetic revolution; the other criticizes “pastoral” as repressing the exploitation not only of urban workers in the present but of rural workers in the past. For example, the unreal city of American poetic modernism-cosmopolitan London or Paris refracted through “the simultaneity of the ambient”-does not meet the political demands that Raymond Williams (in The Country and the City) sees cities as making on the literary imagination. To Williams, T. S. Eliot’s urban impressions appear “as relentless and as conventional as pastoral... neo-urban imagery, of the same literary kind as the isolated neo-pastoral ... [mediating] a general despair in the isolated observer!’ Ultimately he diagnoses a continuing, and perhaps necessary, conflict between modernist urban myth making (best represented by the related but disconnected consciousness streams of Ulysses) and the collectivist “social ideas and movements” also produced by the modern city. This dialectical model, with its 1930s aura, still excludes most twentieth-century rural writing in the British Isles. Although Williams finds among the texts of that tradition occasional resistance to an “elegiac, neo-pastoral mode;’ nonetheless “[t]he underlying pattern is ... clear. A critique of a whole dimension of modern life, and with it many necessary general questions, was expressed but also reduced to a convention, which took the form of a detailed version of a part-imagined, part-observed rural England ... [a] strange formation in which observation, myth, record and half history are ... deeply entwined.’2
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