Join CEMS for the launch of Dr. James Metcalf’s Churchyard Poetics: Landscape, Labour, and the Legacy of Genre (Oxford University Press, 2025). We’ll hear from James and two respondents, Dr. Rowan Boyson and Dr. Tess Somervell. The event will be chaired by Prof. Clare Brant. The event will be followed by a reception.
Sign up Link: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/centreforearlymodernstudies/1454442
This event is being kindly co-sponsored by KCL’s Cultural Production and the Organisation of Knowledge research strand.
Book Description
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 towards industrial capitalism. Managing the material of their violently reordered world through genre and other aesthetic strategies, these poets articulate the pressures on working bodies and the associated structures of feeling attendant on the experience of history at its sharpest edge.
The poems examined in Churchyard Poetics thus strain against without resolving the ideal the churchyard is made to express: that collective life is reassuringly organised around places of burial and remembrance. Declining continuity or consolation, the poets at the centre of this book refigure the churchyard as a traumatised landscape and unearth from its wounded ground an affective archive of social injury-of bodies compelled into service by new regimes of labour and dispatched to the churchyard when their usefulness runs out.
Speaker Bios
Dr. James Metcalf is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century English Literature at The University of Manchester. His research focuses on poetry, affect, labour, gender, and sexuality in the eighteenth century and Romantic period, and he has published essays on the poets Charlotte Smith, Robert Blair, Elizabeth Carter, and Mary Leapor. His first monograph is Churchyard Poetics: Landscape, Labour, and the Legacy of Genre (Oxford University Press, 2025).
Prof. Clare Brant (Chair) is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture at King’s College London. She co-edits the Palgrave series Studies in Life Writing, and has published widely on eighteenth-century and life writing topics. She currently holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for which she is writing a book, Underwater Lives, which aims to add underwater life writing to blue humanities.
Dr. Rowan Boyson (Respondent) is Reader in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature at King’s College London. Her research focuses on the poetry of the long eighteenth century, the history of the senses, and environmental humanities. Her current project is provisionally titled The Shared Air: Atmosphere and the Right to Breathe in Enlightenment Britainand has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. The project offers a history of how writers and scientists from 1640-1840 debated the political implications of air.
Dr. Tess Somervell (Respondent) is Lecturer in English at Worcester College, University of Oxford. She previously held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on the literature and culture of the period 1660–1830, and on literature and the environment. Her first book, Reading Time in the Long Poem: Milton, Thomson and Wordsworth, was published with Edinburgh University Press in 2022.