Domestic Georgic

Inspired by Virgil’s Georgics, “a wonderful book on early modern writers and the kitchen arts” conceptualizes Renaissance poetry as a domestic labor (The New York Review of Books).

When is literary production more menial than inspired, more like housework than heroics of the mind? In this revisionist study, Katie Kadue shows that some of the authors we credit with groundbreaking literary feats—including Michel de Montaigne and John Milton—conceived of their writing in surprisingly modest and domestic terms. In contrast to the monumental ambitions associated with the literature of the age, and picking up an undercurrent of Virgil’s Georgics, poetic labor of the Renaissance emerges here as often aligned with so-called women’s work. Kadue reveals how male authors’ engagements with a feminized georgic mode became central to their conceptions of what literature is and could be. This other georgic strain in literature shared the same primary concern as housekeeping: the necessity of constant, almost invisible labor to keep the things of the world intact. Domestic Georgic brings into focus a conception of literary—as well as scholarly and critical—labor not as a striving for originality and fame but as a form of maintenance work that aims at preserving individual and collective life.

“[Kadue] offers both new insights into familiar authors and works and a new rubric one might use to discuss other texts and authors as well.” ―Genre

“An unusually engaging read.” ―Modern Language Quarterly

“Lucid, lively, and shrewd, at once sophisticated and unpretentious.” ―Jeff Dolven, Princeton University

“Gives us a recipe to reread the Renaissance.” ―Katherine Ibbett, Trinity College, University of Oxford