Pastoral and Anti-Pastoral: Representation of City and Village in Literature

Neepa Sarkar, Shubhanku Kochar

• Publisher: ibidem
• Year: 2024
• Edition: 0
• eBook ISBN:
  9783838279046
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Village is not just a place, but an idea. Likewise, a city is not just a place, but a metaphor. Human imagination has conceived both village and city as opposite to one another. When we were tired of living in villages, we invented cities; when we no-longer wanted to stay in the cities, we went back to villages. Village life is conventionally perceived as idyllic with clean air, water, food and helpful neighbors; whereas life in the city is often regarded as complicated, isolated, expensive and dwelling of crime. This collected volume critically discusses the literary representation of the village and the city. Its contributors argue that villages are also capable of crime, violence, and punishment along with cities, and cities can also be a place of deep love, friendship, and compassion just like villages. Many contributors also bring home the environmental implications of both village and city with reference to the contemporary model of development. The volume has a global approach-the contributors examine literary representation of village and city from such diverse locations as India, England, America, Nigeria, Algeria, Island, Turkey, Greece, South Asia, and many more.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• 1 Shunned Space Theory and Complex Pastoral Interpretation
• 2 The Urbanized Pastoral in the Novels of Thomas Hal Phillips
• 3 Culture, Identity, Diaspora and Displacement in Monica Ali’s
• 4 The London Underground in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere
• 5 Casteism and Countryside: A Literary Scrutiny
• 6 Romantic Ireland’s ‘Dead and Gone’: Reading the Antipastoral in Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart.
• 7 Artificial Nature in 19th Century France: the Buttes Chaumont Park and Landscape Art
• 8 ‘Schrödinger’s Pedestrian’:(ab)history & the (ab)pastoral in Miéville’s The City & The City
• 9 Irish Protestant Poets and the Dichotomy of Urban Belfast and Rural West
• 10 Jamaica Kincaid’s Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas as a Black Pastoral
• 11 Urban Pastoral and Collective Memory in Penelope Lively’s City of the Mind
• 12 Paradise to Paradise Lost: Transforming Rural scape in Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhay’s Aranyak
• 13 P(i)e(a)ce in Pastoral
• 14 Pastoral Paradoxes: A Study of Ankush Saikia’s The Forest Beneath the Mountains
• 15 Dystopian Landscapes, Urban and Rural, of the Spanish Generation of 1898
• 16 Between Retreats and Returns: The Elusive Homeland in Temsula Ao’s These Hills Called Home
• 17 The Pastoral as History and Myth: ‘Professorial’ Travail in Freya Stark’s Ionian Quest