"Wish You Were Here": Exporting England in James Grainger's The Sugar-Cane

Abstract

As Raymond Williams has shown in The Country and the City, something called "the English countryside" is already a fully discursive entity by the seventeenth century, synthesized and regulated by an impressive variety of aesthetic, literary, and ideological codes. 2 Laura Brown further demonstrates in her work on Alexander Pope and more recently in Ends of Empire that the ideological labor of pastoralizing and naturalizing mercantile-capitalist social relations continued unabated in the eighteenth century. 3 If anything, the literary and aesthetic making of the English countryside in the image of pastoral ideals acquires greater urgency as the very gap between agrarian ideal and material realities becomes more palpable. John Barrell, in his readings of Thomson and Dyer, for example, has shown what severe strains georgic and pastoral myths of the English countryside are under as they seek to contain and represent a rapidly diversifying and heterogeneous mercantile society in the eighteenth century. 4 Within the context of these readings of English loco-descriptive, georgic, and pastoral verse as distinct ideological forms, I propose to examine James Grainger's quirky 1764 poem in four books entitled The Sugar-Cane.