Churchyard Poetics: Landscape, Labour, and the Legacy of Genre

The familiar literary-critical category of 'graveyard poetry' has made the eighteenth-century churchyard a commonplace in the period's cultural imaginary: a location in which melancholy, religious poets get lost in imaginative reveries or didactic visions of the afterlife.By contrast, Churchyard Poetics: Landscape, Labour, and the Legacy of Genre shows how the churchyard takes on a new shape and a fresh importance for a counter-tradition of women and labouring-class poets, for whom this landscape is a resting place with no closure.In work by Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, Charlotte Smith, and John Clare-but also for Robert Blair, Thomas Gray, and William Wordsworth-the churchyard emerges as a contested space of social life through a shared focus on the body as the instrument of labour.Churchyard Poetics focuses on how these poets use genres like georgic, pastoral, topographical poetry, and elegy to locate the churchyard in a broader terrain of laborious life, disarranged in the press towar