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From Fleece to Fleets; or, Wool and the Production of Wonder

Abstract:The commodity of wool occupies a central place in the English imaginary of the eighteenth century, which is evident in the writings of Daniel Defoe, John Smith, and John Dyer. Dyer's four-book poem The Fleece (1757) employs a georgic narrative to trace the movement of fleece from organic substance to global commodity, using a coterminous production of wonder to turn up aesthetic possibilities that unwittingly reconfigure time and space. Drawing on Rajani Sudan's theory of "alchemical transmutation" and Adam Smith's notes on wonder, I argue that Dyer's georgic mode yields a form of apprehension unbound by temporal or spatial constraints, seeing the future in the present and the global in the local. The doubleness that inheres to Dyer's poem throughout inadvertently reveals an uneasiness, incoherence, and audacity structuring its economic and imperial triumphalism.