{"product_id":"the-work-of-reform-literature-and-political-ecology-from-langland-to-spenser-9781501783241","title":"The Work of Reform: Literature and Political Ecology from Langland to Spenser","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Work of Reform\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e interweaves literary, economic, and environmental history to trace the influence that William Langland's harsh vision of enforced agrarian labor in \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003ePiers Plowman\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e had on later medieval and early modern thinking about land and improvement in Britain and Ireland, culminating with Edmund Spenser's colonial writing.\u003c\/b\u003e William Rhodes brings together a rich poetic archive with agrarian husbandry manuals, prose polemics, and imperial tracts to connect conflicts over land and labor on the English manor to those of Tudor Ireland, offering a new eco-Marxist literary history of ecological transformation across the medieval-modern divide. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the aftermath of the Black Death, the depopulation of the countryside, and the beginnings of the Enclosure Movement, English poets imagined enforced labor as a panacea for social unrest precipitated by environmental catastrophe. Arguing that \u003ci\u003ePiers Plowman\u003c\/i\u003e established how poetry could envision religious and economic transformation based on agrarian production, \u003ci\u003eThe Work of Reform\u003c\/i\u003e reveals that the \u003ci\u003ePiers Plowman\u003c\/i\u003e tradition's valorization of agrarian toil was open to appropriation by later writers developing totalizing, top-down colonialist projects.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eWilliam Rhodes is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Cornell University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51589824315666,"sku":"9781501783241","price":142.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_8269a07c-3b7f-4f49-8a37-0e8b87dcafd4.jpg?v=1756808650","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/the-work-of-reform-literature-and-political-ecology-from-langland-to-spenser-9781501783241","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}