‘’Tis agreeable to see what use he has made of his Reading’

Autor: Jennifer Batt
Rok vydání: 2020
Předmět:
Zdroj: Class, Patronage, and Poetry in Hanoverian England
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198859666.003.0003
Popis: This chapter explores a question which has preoccupied readers of Stephen Duck’s writing from the eighteenth century to the present day: how would a man who had spent much of his life working on a farm write about rural life and agricultural labour? Duck’s most critically acclaimed work is ‘The Thresher's Labour’, a poeticized account of a year in the life of an agricultural labourer. This chapter offers a new reading of this much-discussed poem by considering it in the light of the literary sources and models with which Duck was familiar. The chapter argues that Duck’s artfully crafted labourer’s-eye view of the agricultural year drew on his reading as much as it did his lived experience. Duck’s poem challenged conventional poetic idealizations of rural life and labour not because—as some of Duck’s readers have assumed—it was the work of an uneducated thresher; rather, that challenge was the deliberate result of Duck’s careful study of those very poetic conventions.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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