Alexander Dick

Romantic Improvement: The Infrastructural Poetics of Agricultural Capitalism restores the material and ideological continuities between the eighteenth-century agricultural phenomenon called Improvement and the early nineteenth-century cultural development called Romanticism. The enclosure and allotment of the commons, the introduction of numerous management techniques like irrigation, crop rotation, selective breeding, wasteland planting, leases, and the proliferation of the picturesque, pastoral, and lyric genres, as well as agricultural tours and periodicals: Improvement is the origin of capitalism. Improvement’s infrastructure, not only enclosure’s fences or draining’s ditches but also agriculture’s rhetoric, scaffolds Romanticism; Romanticism is the cultural superstructure’s response to changes in the socioeconomic base. The poetics we have come to call Romantic were consolidations and sublations of poetics that served functions in this infrastructure. Romantic Improvement studies the agricultural-aesthetic writing of Improvers like Lord Kames, Edmund Burke, Arthur Young, William Marshall, and hundreds more alongside and as a crucial, overlooked part of the aesthetic-agricultural poetry of Romantics like William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Clare. Each chapter focuses on one poet in the context of his involvement in Improvement, whether larch planting, irrigation, or labour management, and in the context of his corollary development of a certain generic component of Improvement infrastructure, whether the picturesque, with its commodification of waste and mandate of total profitability, the pastoral, with its naturalization of sociotechnical means and laundering of managerial experience, or the lyric, with its conflations of scarcity and productivity and of pleasure and labour. As a result, canonical literary criticism is shifted to accommodate this history and to resolve heretofore unresolved questions about the interactions of nature and culture under agricultural capitalism.

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In this dissertation, I investigate the ways in which cookbooks published in Britain between 1660 and 1760 helped to shape conceptions of physical and aesthetic taste. I propose that in the early and mid-eighteenth century aesthetics and cookery were neither parallel phenomena nor completely distinct from each other, but public discourses that intersected and changed over time. These intersections helped to define many of the modern notions of subjectivity, professionalism, and disciplinarity with which we are familiar today. The central works I consider are the cookbooks of Hannah Woolley, Mary Kettilby, Hannah Glasse, Ann Cook, and Martha Bradley. Examined within the background of an expanding print culture, these texts show that cookery was a multifaceted and critical form of writing. Following Jürgen Habermas' theory of the conceptual zones of the eighteenth-century, I argue that cookbooks were crucially and self-consciously aware of the porous nature of the intimate, private, and public spheres in which they circulated and that this awareness determined the way cookbooks constructed and critiqued ideas of taste. Female cookery authors were engaged with similar concerns around tasting, judgment, and subjectivity as philosophers like Locke, Shaftesbury, Hume, and Kames. I begin with the origins of the printed cookbook, demonstrating how early examples of the genre looked back to an embedded and indistinct domestic realm, while at the same time anticipating the public private division reinforced by print. I then uncover the ways in which female cookery book authors, unlike their male contemporaries, took up empiricist philosophy in order to construct taste as a sensory experience of judging subjects, before examining how this construction of taste was interpreted as transgressing boundaries of gender and privacy. In my final chapter, I show how taste transforms from an embodied, local phenomenon, to one that is public and critically engaged, and ultimately how taste in cookery is disciplined out of the public sphere, becoming linked only with the reproduction of food.

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