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Eighteenth-Century Georgic and the Hard Work of the Body Eighteenth-Century Georgic and the Hard Work of the Body
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Dirty Work: ‘this ado in Earthing up a Carcase’ Dirty Work: ‘this ado in Earthing up a Carcase’
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1 ‘Earthing up’: Robert Blair’s Churchyard Georgic
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Published:January 2025
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Abstract
Chapter 1 presses on the seemingly innocent figures of nature in Robert Blair’s The Grave (1743) to highlight the poem’s difficulty with working the irremediably physical churchyard landscape into a vision of the afterlife through the medium of an ambivalent georgic poetics—a variation on the genre that this chapter calls churchyard georgic. The body is an unignorable subject in The Grave—one that cannot easily be redeemed by Christian models of transcendence or consolation, nor reduced to a prop for didactic imperatives to look to death for moral improvement. A source of some anxiety in a religious text seemingly intent upon the afterlife, this indivisibility of body from earth is a georgic fixation, and the poet must work continually to restore the dead who insist on their status as decaying matter. This chapter examines how the novel association of The Grave and the georgic tradition encourages a different approach to the eighteenth-century fascination with places of burial and human remains, as poets make much imaginative work from the lowest of materials: the earth from which we are made and to which we return. Where this orthodoxy has seemed so universal in the ‘death-the-leveller’ didacticism of ‘graveyard poetry’, its complication by georgic’s more proximate and socially determined pressures transfigure the churchyard into a scene of hard work.
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