Can I read The Commons on EtoBox?

The Commons by Collis, Stephen , 1965- is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is The Commons about?

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, most of the English common lands were enclosedtaken, by force, out of the hands of local collective use and privatized. The resistance to capitalisms primitive accumulation, registered in recurring peasant revolts, failed to stem this tide of what we now call privatizationbut it spilt over into Romanticisms own advocacy of a kind of literary commons. Underground in the literary since the nineteenth century, the fight against enclosure resurfaces today amidst continuing capitalist accumulations and a renascent sense of the commons under globalization. In The Commons we wander the English countryside with the so-called mad peasant poet John Clare, just escaped from an Essex asylum and walking the more than eighty miles to his home in Helpston; we pick wild fruit with anarchist Henry David Thoreau, also newly escaped from jail (for not paying his poll tax); and we comb the English Lake District, undermining William Wordsworths proprietary claim upon it, with a host of authors of Romantic Guides and Tours. Resisting enclosure with each word, tearing down (intellectual) propertys fencing, wandering in search of new commons, new spaces ou

Author

Collis, Stephen , 1965-

Publisher

Vancouver: Talonbooks

Published

2008

Language

EN

ISBN

9780889225800

Subjects

Literary Fiction, Poetry, Humanities

Rating

3.85 / 5 (38 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14