© 2003 by Oxford University Press
The Georgic at Mid-Eighteenth Century and the Case of Dodsley's ‘Agriculture’
1 University of Oslo
As a result of the recent wave of interest in eighteenth-century georgic, the first scholarly edition of James Grainger's The Sugar-Cane (1764) has appeared, and full-scale scholarly editions of John Dyer's The Fleece (1757) and John Philips's Cyder (1708) are forthcoming. A student edition of Cyder has recently been published, and a substantial part of The Fleece has been included in a major student anthology. Unlike these works, however, Dodsley's formal georgic ‘Agriculture’ (1753) has been universally neglected. It is in many ways an appealing poem, though Dodsley failed to develop some basic strategies of the genre, a failure related to his modest class and educational background and his ambiguous social position. Dodsley's negotiation of prescriptive and descriptive elements in the georgic, however, renders him central to the development of the seriously documentary form in the 1750s. Close analysis of his poem contributes to a sharpened perception of its notoriously protean genre, and supports the argument that the decline of the georgic was due more to literary, and less to political and ideological, circumstances than has recently been argued.