Whistling at the Plough : Poetic Infrastructure from Improvement to Romanticism

By developing and then applying a reflexive, situated, and genuinely interdisciplinary theory of literature and social practice, this original study shows how romanticism was the acculturation of agricultural improvement's poetic infrastructure, providing a rich new understanding of nature, labour, agriculture, art, and experience.

Literary forms are ways of doing work through the repeated arrangement of linguistic elements. Reading history and forms such as aesthetics with Burke, Kames, and Young, larch-planting and the picturesque with Wordsworth, irrigation and the pastoral with Shelley, and labour management and the lyric with Clare, this original study shows how romanticism was the acculturation of agricultural improvement's poetic infrastructure. This infrastructure is a historically specific set of such forms and their associated physical media and social practices. Both are made from everyday language-uses and are not unique to – though they receive unique attention in – literature, which makes literature necessary for understanding their historical change and their role in other historical changes. Examining contemporary agricultural case studies, Nathan TeBokkel shows that romanticism was conditioned by and then enfolded into the infrastructure concerned with nature, labour, their management, and their improvement, thereby remaining paradigmatic in these fields to the present day.