A working woman's topography: working class female poets' responses to land and labour in England 1730-1789' and 'Gig'

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The creative component will be a poetry collection, provisionally titled 'Gig': approximately 40 topographical poems. Many poems will represent labour, and articulate discourses of labour. The critical component will be a study of working-class women's topographical representations of labour in eighteenth-century poetry. Creative ComponentMy collection will build on the works of cultural-geographer poets such as Alice Oswald, Karen Solie, Jean Sprackland and Peter Riley.I am inspired by the Georgic poets' enthusiasm for the prosaic. I will rise to their challenge and write poetry about Uber drivers and road re-surfacing. My collection will engage, not just with idealised dry-stone wallers and poachers, but unsited software engineers and telesales executives. I will articulate contradictory discourses on work - how it can support or destroy our health. I am interested in how labour forms a place. In Calderdale, the legacy of eighteenth-century transport infrastructure and enclosure is still apparent. This is in our physical environment and in how enclosure changed labour and the relationship to land - shaping concepts of ownership, responsibility and landscape aesthetics. Eighteenth-century growth of unsecure wage-labour echoes our gig-economy. Continuity and discontinuity can be seen in job titles, e.g. pinder, vlogger.Poems will include: a late-night taxi driver; a swimming-pool maintenance person and where the water comes from; the workers who put causey-stones in but have no headstones themselves. The poems will be very varied in tone and form; using dramatic monologue and found poetry e.g. from Calderdale Local Collection. The collection will be deepened by intertextuality. Using an innovative layout, I will include found text, both modern and historical, to be read alongside the poems, throwing them into relief.Community engagement is integral to the creative component. After desk-based research into labour discourses, e.g. public health, I shall interview and work-shadow white and blue collar workers. Critical ComponentThe English georgic dominated the first half of the century and much critical work has been done on these poems. The georgic, with 'masculine' themes of labour and agriculture, appears to be male dominated. Since Lonsdale's anthology of women poets in 1989, academics such as Landry, Milne and Ingrassia have firmly re-placed female poets in this period of literary history. Yet, thirty years on, their poetry remains under-studied. Very few women poets have their own scholarly editions; and of the working-class poets, only Mary Leapor has been accorded this attention, in 2003. As Landry writes: "No sooner had the question 'Were there any?' been answered by Roger Lonsdale's ground-breaking anthology[...]when sceptics enquired 'Were they any good?' " My PhD will build on the work of pioneers in the field of women's, and working-class, literary history. I am part of the second wave of scholarship that sees these previously excluded poets, not as novelties or anomalies, but a neglected part of literary history, worthy of critical interest.The two research questions are: what is working-class female poets' contribution to the shifting treatment of labour and land through the mid-late century; particularly, their response to the male-dominated English georgic? Secondly, does treating these poets as a group reveal insights about their treatment of topographical labour? This study aims, not to look at a poet(s) complete output, but to more accurately place and read a group of poets within literary historical context.