(Ebook) Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton by Katie Kadue ISBN 9780226797359, 022679735X

(Ebook) Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton by Katie Kadue ISBN 9780226797359, 022679735X

When is literary production more menial than inspired, more like housework than heroics of the mind? In this revisionist study, Katie Kadue shows that some of the authors we credit with groundbreaking literary feats—including Michel de Montaigne & John Milton—conceived of their writing in surprisingly modest & domestic terms. In contrast to the monumental ambitions associated with the literature of the age, & picking up an undercurrent of Virgil’s Georgics, poetic labor of the Renaissance emerges here as often aligned with so-called women’s work. 

Kadue reveals how male authors’ engagements with a feminized georgic mode became central to their conceptions of what literature is & could be. This other georgic strain in literature shared the same primary concern as housekeeping: the necessity of constant, almost invisible labor to keep the things of the world intact. 

Domestic Georgic brings into focus a conception of literary—as well as scholarly & critical—labor not as a striving for originality & fame but as a form of maintenance work that aims at preserving individual & collective life.

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I am a literary critic & scholar of 16th- & 17th-century French & English literature. I received my PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley, where I wrote a dissertation that received the 2018 Charles Bernheimer Prize for best dissertation from the American Comparative Literature Association. I have taught & held fellowships in the Society of Fellows @ the U. of Chicago & the Society for the Humanities @ Cornell, & have also taught @ Deep Springs College & the Prison University Project @ San Quentin.

In my academic research, I’m interested in how experiences of gender & labor in early modern culture get stylized through particular literary genres & modes, including epic, georgic, & love lyric.