Mediating a Pauline poetics : the imperial, sacred georgics of John Dyer and William Cowper

This report offers an analysis of the ways in which two eighteenth century georgic poems, John Dyer’s The Fleece and William Cowper’s The Task, mediate evangelical and imperial practices. Through an inquiry into the recent critical intersection between Kevis Goodman’s media focused research into the georgic and Clifford Siskin and William Warner’s similarly inflected inquiry into the Enlightenment, this report suggests that the didactic, agricultural musings of Dyer and Cowper betray a deep engagement the consequences of imperialism and the execution of Britain’s dawning evangelical charge.