The Work of Reform by William Rhodes PAPERBACK 9781501783258

Cornell University Press

The Work of ReformLiterature and Political Ecology from Langland to Spenser\nAuthor(s): William Rhodes\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: Cornell University Press, United States\nImprint: Cornell University Press\nISBN-13: 9781501783258, 978-1501783258\nSynopsis\nThe Work of Reform interweaves literary, economic, and environmental history to trace the influence that William Langland's harsh vision of enforced agrarian labor in Piers Plowman had on later medieval and early modern thinking about land and improvement in Britain and Ireland, culminating with Edmund Spenser's colonial writing. 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. \n\n In the aftermath of the Black Death, the depopulation of the countryside, and the .