American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Literature.(Book Review)

Publication: CLIO

Publication Date: 01-JAN-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne

By Timothy Sweet. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. 222 pages.

The virtue of labor has deep ideological roots in American culture. For the New English Puritans, it served as a sign of spiritual grace, or "sanctification"; for colonial and early national Americans, it helped to rationalize "civilized" claims to lands inhabited by Native Americans; for the American Revolutionaries, it served as part of the constellation of virtues that supposedly distinguished them from corrupted Britons. Or consider the importance of the virtue of labor in American literary history: John Smith haranguing his fellow Jamestown settlers to stop searching for gold and start tilling the land, the Jeffersonian paean to the American yeoman farmer in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), or the protagonist of Walden (1854) tilling his "half--cultivated" bean field as the symbol of his spiritual identity. The role of human labor, and its effects on economy and environment, are central to Timothy Sweet's thoughtful, wide-ranging study of the georgic in Anglo-American literary history. It is, as he notes, not meant to be a comprehensive history of the georgic, a genre whose literary roots reside in Virgil and traditionally celebrate the capacity of human labor to improve the natural environment. Rather, the book analyzes crucial sites of georgic discourses from the precolonial era through the American Civil War. Throughout, it manages to draw intriguing points of continuity and change across a broad historical canvas.

Sweet is theoretically grounded in contemporary literary and environmental criticism. Rather than debunking any single critic--the usual suspects, including Lawrence Buell, Paul Alpers, Leo Marx, and Cecilia Tichi--he makes the more important argument that literary criticism typically confounds the categories of pastoral and georgic. While the former elides the human element in natural landscape, the latter (albeit often ambivalently) incorporates the two. By effacing the role of human agency in...

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