Tending the Plot: Literary Ecology and the Reception of Virgil's Georgics

Abstract

This dissertation examines the reception of Virgil’s Georgics from the perspective of ecocriticism, a branch of literary studies that focuses on depictions of nature and the environment. In my analysis of Latin and Greek didactic and pastoral poetry and technical prose from antiquity and late antiquity, twentieth-century botanical scholarship and travel literature, and present-day translations and commentaries, I investigate how interpreters and adaptors of Virgil’s middle poem have situated his depictions of agricultural processes and landscape change within their own ecological imaginaries. Today, perceptions of climate change have already begun to transform the way we interpret texts; at other points in time, I argue, narratives about human interactions with the natural world have likewise influenced interpretations of the Georgics, and the poem has entered and inflected these narratives in turn. My argument unfolds across four chapters, each comprising five case studies that address the reception of Virgil’s sections on tree grafting and gardening in Georgics 2 and 4. Chapter 1 considers skeptical interpretations of Virgil’s biologically implausible grafts in nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship and botanical manuals, then examines responses to Virgil’s anthropomorphized trees in post-Virgilian pastoral and Greek epigram. In Chapter 2, more accepting approaches to Virgilian grafting in ancient and late antique prose and Renaissance Neo-Latin didactic are set alongside traditions that conceive of Virgil himself as a sort of marvelous graft. Chapter 3 examines responses to the Virgilian garden in ancient and late antique horticultural poetry, Renaissance didactic, and twentieth-century translation. Finally, Chapter 4 investigates the reception of Virgilian landscapes in and beyond the Georgics, focusing on twentieth-century Anglophone commentaries, scholarship, and travel writing. My analysis accounts for the literary and ecological contexts of reception texts, discusses their modes of engagement with the Georgics, and describes their methods of expressing human impacts on the biosphere. Throughout, I argue that the reading history of the Georgics—in scholarly as well as literary modes—has both informed and been shaped by readers’ perceptions of these impacts: the poem is deeply implicated in formulations of human interventions in the natural world. The specifics and scale of modern ecological upheaval were not available to most of the texts treated here; still, by investigating past environmental receptions of the Georgics we can better understand how the interpretation of literature may be shaped by present and future perceptions of climate change.