{"product_id":"the-work-of-reform-1","title":"The Work of Reform","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Work of Reform\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e interweaves literary, economic, and environmental history to trace the influence that William Langland's harsh vision of enforced agrarian labor in \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003ePiers Plowman\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e had on later medieval and early modern thinking about land and improvement in Britain and Ireland, culminating with Edmund Spenser's colonial writing.\u003c\/b\u003e 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. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the aftermath of the Black Death, the depopulation of the countryside, and the beginnings of the Enclosure Movement, English poets imagined enforced labor as a panacea for social unrest precipitated by environmental catastrophe. Arguing that \u003ci\u003ePiers Plowman\u003c\/i\u003e established how poetry could envision religious and economic transformation based on agrarian production, \u003ci\u003eThe Work of Reform\u003c\/i\u003e reveals that the \u003ci\u003ePiers Plowman\u003c\/i\u003e tradition's valorization of agrarian toil was open to appropriation by later writers developing totalizing, top-down colonialist projects.\u003c\/p\u003e\n","brand":"William Rhodes","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55030880502140,"sku":"9781501783258","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0251\/4980\/0541\/files\/9781501783258.jpg?v=1742331618","url":"https:\/\/combined-academic.myshopify.com\/products\/the-work-of-reform-1","provider":"Combined Academic Publishers - Mare Nostrum Group","version":"1.0","type":"link"}