Anna Foy, University of Pennsylvania and Chemical Heritage Foundation
Chemical Heritage Foundation, Brown Bag Lecture
Time: 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.
Place: 6th Floor Conference Room, Chemical Heritage Foundation
Information: 215-873-8289 or bbl@chemheritage.org
Foy’s talk focuses on the two works motivating her broad research on 18th-century agricultural writings: Samuel Martin’s prose pamphlet on sugarcane cultivation, An Essay upon Plantership (1750 ff.), and James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane (1764 ff.), a blank-verse long poem treating the same theme. Both were unusual even by 18th-century standards: they dealt with a monoculture unknown to the ancients, a commodity rather than a subsistence crop, and an agricultural system that utilized slave labor. After explaining what these works look like and how they differ from contemporary European agricultural writings, Foy will explain why they have posed interpretive problems for modern scholars. She argues that one needs to know something about 18th-century literary theory to understand.
Anna Foy is a graduate student in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. This past fall, she came to CHF on a short-term fellowship to conduct research on 18th-century agricultural writings. She is now finishing up her dissertation, which is tentatively entitled "Poetry and the Common Weal: Conceiving the Poet’s Civic Service in the Long Eighteenth Century."