From the start of his career, Jonathan Swift was caught up in debates about the relative value of ancient and modern cultures. Swift’s first masterpieces, ‘The Battel of the Books’ and A Tale of a Tub (both pub. 1704), were brilliant satirical interventions on the side of ancient cultures against the moderns. This chapter unpicks the density of allusion in these works, explaining how they relate to the broader ‘quarrel’ between the ancients and moderns. A final section traces the legacy of this dispute in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), in which Swift invokes ancient Sparta as a model for social integrity.

“This chapter focuses on the two main philosophical questions raised by Swift in Gulliver’s Travels. First is the problem of perspectivism, the idea that objectivity is impossible because knowledge is circumscribed by human subject positions. Differences between the four parts of Gulliver’s Travels suggest that Swift recognized no stable relationship between truth ‘in itself’ and what individuals believe about the world, but only comparisons in quality or scope between different perspectives. Second is a question about the relative validity of two different positions in Christian ethics: the optimistic neo-Stoicism espoused by Swift’s friend Alexander Pope, and the pessimistic Augustinianism preferred by Swift himself. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift gave eloquent expression both to his scepticism about the beneficence of God and nature and to his narrow estimation of the limits of human reason.”

This chapter argues that the East Anglian Fens, a 1,500-square-mile diamond of flat, low-lying land given over largely to agriculture, are a perfect test case for thinking about georgic at the level of landscape. An ancient landscape that seems to forbid organic metaphor, the Fens can seem like perpetually un-reclaimed literary ground. Yet since Caryl Churchill’s Fen (1982) and Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) contemporary authors have found a more involving territory there than in more conventionally literary landscapes in the Lakes, the Yorkshire Moors or the Wessex uplands. The history of the Fens places often remote and lonely agricultural lives in a setting shaped by mighty human efforts against huge natural forces, especially those of river and sea. In the fens it is easy for georgic writing to lose its human scale. Here both farmer and writer must make a reckoning with everything that the landscape has excluded.

This introductory chapter is a headland to the larger field of the history of English georgic writing. It is set aside for a general survey of English georgic viewed through the contexts of agrarian history in the British Isles and of non-literary agricultural writing published over the last five centuries. The aim is to draw out some historical patterns and to fill in some of the literary gaps between chapters. It begins with three contemporary snapshots of British writers demonstrating some of the formal resources the georgic tradition can afford today. Six further sections survey about a century of georgic writing each.