American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Literature

by Timothy Sweet

In classical terms the georgic celebrates the working landscape, cultivated to become fruitful and prosperous, in contrast to the idealized or fanciful landscapes of the pastoral. Arguing that economic considerations must become central to any understanding of the human community's engagement with the natural environment, Timothy Sweet identifies a distinct literary mode he calls the American georgic.

Offering a fresh approach to ecocritical and environmentally-oriented literary studies, Sweet traces the history of the American georgic from its origins in late sixteenth-century English literature promoting the colonization of the Americas through the mid-nineteenth century, ending with George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature (1864), the foundational text in the conservationist movement.

232 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Aram · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that purports to conceptualize something as self-evident of the American 'georgic' isn't really revolutionary. That being said, this book is pretty dense with excellent primary-source analysis, and does a pretty good job.

[David Bates · Rating 4 out of 5]

Timothy Sweet’s 2002 work American Georgics focused not on the degradation of nature, but searched for moments in American history when people grappled with responsible land management and temporarily held together sustainable systems. While Leo Marx focused on pastoral literature in the tradition of Virgil’s Ecologues, Sweet brought together a different body of literature which he placed in the tradition of Virgil’s Georgics: literature that focused on working the land and using it responsibly. Instead of focusing on nature’s pristine or sublime beauty, the Georgics selected focus on the transformation of the environment through labor for the benefit of humans. While it might seem that on “Worster’s terms, georgic would line up with the ‘imperial’ stance,” Sweet argued, “even the arcadian Thoreau recognized, we must labor to produce our lives.” To preserve the environments into future generations what was most necessary was not attention to wilderness but to the land we are engaged in as members of the human community. Accordingly Sweet introduced often overlooked works and arguments from prominent authors such as the Hakluyts, John Smith, William Bradford, Benjamin Rush and Henry David Thoreau, as well as less immediately recognizable authors, that attempted to grapple with questions of how to relate the economy to the environment in ways that achieved the public good. What emerges from his analysis of the literature are both general insights, such as the error of believing that early Americans were not engaged with issues of sustainability prior to the end of the nineteenth century, and suggestive observations. Pastoral literature, for instance, gained in popularity among colonial southern planters in the same decades that slavery was consolidated and they no longer had to labor as intensely or directly on the land as previously. In line with Changes in the Land, Sweet’s view is that property rights and sedentary agriculture both contribute to unsustainability, and his later chapters give space to literature from the early post-revolutionary America which exalted sedentary farming as a social and political attack on backcountry farmers who practiced less exhaustive slash and burn farming on the frontier. The Cherokee of Georgia are the great missed chance of American agriculture according to Sweet, their demonstration of the superior sustainability of nationally owned but individually worked land cut short by the Trail of Tears.