{"product_id":"the-work-of-reform-william-rhodes-9781501783241","title":"The Work of Reform: Literature and Political Ecology from Langland to Spenser","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\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\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e William Rhodes\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 1501783246\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9781501783241\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Cornell University Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 09\/15\/2025\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 246\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Hardcover","brand":"William Rhodes","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":46962449055999,"sku":"9781501783241","price":130.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_15f174ad-3a58-4f73-8137-2fb6cee8641e.jpg?v=1750651464","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/the-work-of-reform-william-rhodes-9781501783241","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}