John Clare and Enclosure Again: Against Simplification

Clark, Timothy

Abstract

This paper offers a revised overview of the now distortedly over-familiar topic of John Clare and enclosure, qualifying the emerging critical truism that this human injustice was also a fierce assault on biodiversity, one which can be immediately assimilated into contemporary anxieties about the global biosphere. A championing of Clare in these moral/ecological terms has become rather glib, even evasive of our own complex material and ethical entrapments in the Anthropocene. Enclosure in Clare’s context was undoubtedly a decisive step in the incorporation of food-production into an unjust market/capitalist economy, a dispossession making possible the industrial agriculture of later centuries, but it was hardly the creation of some ecological waste-land. Rereadings of Clare’s “The Mores” and the poem known as “The Fens” suggest that the accounts of enclosure given there by Clare himself, or ascribed to him, are not as fully assured or as knowing as they might seem to be.

Citation

Clark, T. (2024). John Clare and Enclosure Again: Against Simplification. In M. Demson, & R. Hewitt (Eds.), Law, Equity and Romantic Writing: Seeking Justice in the Age of Revolutions (238-257). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

• Publication Date: 2024-09
• Deposit Date: Jun 13, 2024
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Pages: 238-257
• Series Title: Edinburgh Critical Studies in Romanticism
• Book Title: Law, Equity and Romantic Writing: Seeking Justice in the Age of Revolutions
• Chapter Number: 12
• ISBN: 9781399500371
• Keywords: John Clare, enclosure, justice, biodiversity, food-production, capitalism, Anthropocene
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2482555
• Publisher URL: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-law-equity-and-romantic-writing.html
• Contract Date: Jun 1, 2023