Rural Rides In The Counties Of Surrey Kent Sussex Hants Berks Oxford Bucks Wilts Somerset Gloucester Hereford Salop Worcester Stafford Leicester Hertford Essex Suffolk Norfolk Cambridge Huntington Nottingham Lincoln York Lancaster Durham And Northumberland During The Years 1821 To 1832

Author : Ron Broglio
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 1438465696
Total Pages : 180 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (384 download)

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Download or read book Beasts of Burden written by Ron Broglio and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2017-01-30 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Beasts of Burden, Ron Broglio examines how lives—human and animal—were counted in rural England and Scotland during the Romantic period. During this time, Britain experienced unprecedented data collection from censuses, ordinance surveys, and measurements of resources, all used to quantify the life and productivity of the nation. It was the dawn of biopolitics—the age in which biological life and its abilities became regulated by the state. Borne primarily by workers and livestock, nowhere was this regulation felt more powerfully than in the fields, commons, and enclosures. Using literature, art, and cultural texts of the period, Broglio explores the apparatus of biopolitics during the age of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus. He looks at how data collection turned everyday life into citizenship and nationalism and how labor class poets and artists recorded and resisted the burden of this new biopolitical life. The author reveals how the frictions of material life work over and against designs by the state to form a unified biopolitical Britain. At its most radical, this book changes what constitutes the central concerns of the Romantic period and which texts are valuable for understanding the formation of a nation, its agriculture, and its rural landscapes.