7 Key excerpts on "Pastoral Fiction"

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  English Pastoral Music

  From Arcadia to Utopia, 1900-1955

  • Eric Saylor(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • University of Illinois Press

    (Publisher)

  1.What Is Pastoralism?

  As even casual surveys quickly reveal, “pastoral” sports almost as many definitions as it does people who wish to describe it. Among literary specialists, the term traditionally denotes a type of poetry focusing on the lives of shepherds or herdsmen, often (though not exclusively) set against the backdrop of classical antiquity or an idyllic Golden Age.1 However, a tension exists between describing pastoral this way, as a genre (i.e., defined in part by the presence of certain formal characteristics) versus the equally common method of framing it as a mode (i.e., “the place in which our notion of the world comes to be manifested in the text”).2 Many authors also treat the pastoral as a discrete style capable of invoking various literary traits—so many, in fact, that Lawrence Buell has observed that it potentially encompasses “all literature—poetry or prose, fiction or nonfiction—that celebrates the ethos of nature/rurality over…the ethos of the town or city.”3

  This more inclusive construction of the pastoral has obliged literary theorists to acknowledge (sometimes reluctantly) the often messy evolution and transformation of its meaning, in which style, mode, and genre all overlap and interact.4 For instance, William Empson's characterization of pastoralism as a “process of putting the complex into the simple” turns the pastoral into an abstract creative concept rather than a concrete set of literary traits.5 More poetically still, Kate Kennedy describes the pastoral as “a genre shaped by nostalgia: the distance between the present and memory, and the physical distance between the location of the writer and the absent landscape described.”6 These are but two of the many ways that pastoral literature has been reimagined and reinvented over the centuries, exponentially increasing the number and types of works that fall under its rubric and complicating our understanding of just what, exactly, it is.7

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  Pastoral

  • Peter V. Marinelli(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In the modern sense, pastoral is a very broad and very general term far removed from the more specific and distinct meaning attributed to it in earlier times. It scarcely has reference to a literature about actual shepherds, much less about Arcadians. For us it has come to mean any literature which deals with the complexities of human life against a background of simplicity. All that is necessary is that memory and imagination should conspire to render a not too distant past of comparative innocence as more pleasurable than a harsh present, overwhelmed either by the growth of technology or the shadows of advancing age. Certain Victorian novels, those of George Eliot for instance, deal with life in country settings in a period anterior to the Industrial Revolution and express the movement from complexity to simplicity in both time and place. In a more modern instance, we have exchanged the soft primitivism of Arcadia for a hard primitivism in New Hampshire and in so doing found it possible to speak of the pastoral part of Robert Frost. Instructed by William Empson we have been taught to see a sociological pastoral in works as diverse at The Beggar’s Opera and Alice in Wonderland. Or we have begun to transfer the aspects of the pastoral golden age into the time of innocence that every individual can remember, and to speak of a pastoral of childhood. Either the machines have come into the garden, or the world of adult experience casts its long shadows: in any case, it is a long time since the shepherds have all departed, leaving no addresses. In confronting the literary tradition of pastoral then, in opposing to it a world of contemporary or just-outgrown pastoral reality, Wordsworth and some of his immediate predecessors like George Crabbe in effect draw a line, apparently for ever, between the classical and the modern pastoral

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  Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality

  Unfinished Business in Cultural Materialism

  • Alan Sinfield(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Arcadia , introduces tyrannical rulers and foolish locals, never mind: ‘There is a spirituality, therefore, in Arcadian life that co-exists with coarseness and unuplifted crudity by which it remains untouched’ (p. 61). Stanley Fish also credits pastoral with trans-historical relevance. Noting that Theocritus already was removed from the scene he evoked, Fish draws a generic principle: ‘What this means is that everyone who writes in the genre does so with a sense of belatedness, of having missed the beauty and equanimity of a form of life that can be invoked only after the fact of its passing’ (1995:7). Terry Gifford in the New Critical Idiom series takes a very wide definition of pastoral and a mainly instrumental view of its practice. Nonetheless, an implicit universal core may be discerned in his account of the traditional genre: ‘For the reader or audience, this literary device involved some form of retreat and return, the fundamental pastoral movement’ (1999:1).

  Pastoral, it would seem, is eternal; it scarcely needs history. Yet it has a great deal. It begins with some of the oldest writing in the western tradition (Theocritus); then we jump to another time and place with Virgil. Next, often via a forced reading of his fourth eclogue, we skip on into the Christian era, where shepherds may symbolize Jesus himself. Then Wordsworth, in opposition to the received mode, tries to write about real shepherds; yet that too may be regarded as kind of pastoral. Finally, we may be offered the pastoral of childhood, which coincides conveniently with the rural in Cider with Rosie (Laurie Lee) and How Green Was My Valley (Richard Llewellyn).

  Of course, writers such as Spenser, Milton and Pope were highly conscious that they were drawing upon and extending the mode of their predecessors; I am not saying that literary historians have no basis for their sense of genre. What I mean to expose is their commitment to isolating an abiding essence of pastoral, despite and because of the diversity of its historical contexts. Laurence Lerner in The Uses of Nostalgia

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  The New Pastoral in Contemporary British Writing

  • Deborah Lilley(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 Pastoral relations People, place, and nature in contemporary British literary fiction The turn towards place in contemporary British literary fiction has been driven by questions of belonging and influence, framed through rising political tensions, economic uncertainties, and environmental concerns. The pastoral is being used to structure and explore these questions, and examine the shifting cultural and ecological landscapes of the country. The dualisms that the mode animates – between conceptions of the country and the city, the past and the present, and the human and the natural – are placed under new pressures in this context. Factors ranging from borders and Brexit to changing technologies and industries to climate change and sea level rise test the limits of pastoral and its capacity to represent and reflect upon the conditions in which it is being written. It is at these limits that the mode’s critical potential is reinvigorated. Where the rural idyll is absent, where its divisions of space and thought upset expectations, where the effects of retreat are found in new places and altered circumstances, new versions of pastoral – and new insights about contemporary Britain – can be found. 1 As I discussed in Chapter 1, the continuing relevance of pastoral in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has long been subject to debate. For Timothy Morton, for instance, ‘we need a whole new way of evoking the environment’ (2010, 15). The viability of the pastoral concepts of the country and the city in contemporary Britain, and therefore the critical potential of the contrast between them, has attracted particular criticism. In their 1974 analysis of pastoral, John Barrell and John Bull argued against the usefulness of the form, given that ‘it is difficult to pretend that the English countryside is now anything more than an extension of the town’ (1974, 432)

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  Pastoral

  • Terry Gifford(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  7

  POST-PASTORAL

  In offering, in the first chapter, four uses of the term pastoral, the intention was to clarify four general strands of usage – the literary convention, literature of the countryside, the pejorative of idealisation and the landscape of herding animals – rather than to make firm definitive distinctions. It will now be realised how much these strands can overlap in that a travel book about Antarctica by Sara Wheeler, Terra Incognita (Wheeler 1996), might be called a pastoral work in all four senses: she views Antarctica as an Arcadia from which to return with a renewed sense of herself; it is a travelogue describing a natural environment; it could be regarded as an escapist pastoral that self-indulgently ignores, or touches too lightly upon, the urgent political issues concerning the exploitation of the continent; the writer does touch down in New Zealand and the Falklands – landscapes of sheep herding. Indeed, ‘the pastoral’s multiple frames’, as Lawrence Buell puts it, can now be seen to include not only a range of kinds of pastoral, but the way in which a single text may be read within several frames. ‘More often than not’, Buell says of American pastorals, ‘accommodation and reformism are interfused’ (Buell 1995: 52). The Winter’s Tale might posit alternative values in the location of retreat, but must ultimately accommodate its contemporary court audience if it is to be staged at all. Similarly Leo Marx’s ‘pastoral of sentiment and pastoral of the mind’ might not be so easily distinguished in the case of Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ with which this book began. This is not a case in which, as Marx claims, ‘the pastoral design, as always, circumscribes the pastoral ideal’ (Marx 1964: 72). Wordsworth believed his idyll to represent the truth of human interrelatedness with nature.

  But even in putting it this way, we are reading Wordsworth’s texts in a way pastoral has not been read before. Ecocriticism may be the frame of our age, informed in the Anthropocene with a new kind of concern for ‘environment’, rather than ‘countryside’ or ‘landscape’ or the ‘bucolic’, but we cannot pretend that there have not been changes in our knowledge, attitudes and ideology. We cannot pretend that the relationship between texts referring to nature and their urbanised readers, who may live in villages but be economically orientated towards the urban, has not changed as our awareness of environmental crisis has grown. However, Buell’s complaint that the pastoral ‘has been treated with much astringency of late’ (Buell 1995: 33) is still true (see Garrard 2012: 65, Phillips 2003: 19). So we cannot ignore both the scepticism of the anti-pastoral and the development of the pejorative use of ‘pastoral’ in twentieth-century British culture, especially after Raymond Williams’ critique in The Country and the City (Williams 1975). The recent book The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (Garrard 2014) has only two relevant index entries: ‘pastoral’ and ‘critiques of’. On the other hand, in editing The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Environment

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  Thomas Hardy's Pastoral

  An Unkindly May

  • Indy Clark(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  4

  Pastoral and Modernity

  By the end of the nineteenth century many commentators may have been reporting the death of pastoral as a literary convention, but the pastoral impulse was alive and well thanks largely to modernity. As Susan Stanford Friedman has argued, any attempt to define ‘modernity’ is confounded by dissonance, difference, and, perhaps most importantly, an opposition between the meanings signified by social theorists on the one hand and aestheticians on the other. Modernity, she claims, ‘is a term at war with itself, a term that unravels its own definition’ (505). For my purposes, I am considering the effects of a modernity characterized by ‘a specific set of historical conditions developing in the West, including the industrial revolution … the transition to urban culture, the rise of the nation state, and growing power of the bourgeoisie’ (500). Industrial capitalism, the driving force of Western modernity, had created factories, cities, and two new classes in the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The wealth and power of the latter – largely at the expense of the former – were not enough to appease their sense of loss over a world they had played a large part in destroying. Past societies were seen as more organic, more coherent; their simple ways of life would assuage the feelings of rootlessness and alienation that the modern world had brought with it. The subsequent process of selection, manipulation, and even invention, constructed an idealized England that owed much to bourgeois fantasies of what living in the country should be and very little to actual rural relations. The first three sections of this chapter explore how Hardy’s poetry never fully accepts the largely middle-class construction of an English national identity of rurality and order, particularly at times of war. The final sections analyse the place in Hardy’s poetry, and, indeed, modernity, of two of the pastoral’s fundamental signifiers: the contrast between country and city and the figure of the shepherd.

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  A New History of French Literature

  • Denis Hollier(Author)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  Episodes incorporating Arthurian, chivalric tones allow the hero (who is very often a knight disguised as a shepherd) to demonstrate his prowess. Scores of additional characters inhabit the pastoral: other shepherds and shepherdesses, both rivals and friends; aggressive and predatory strangers; priests, magicians, and wise hermits. Frequently their stories are intercalated, interrupting the progress of the primary tale. The wide variety of narrator’s provides the illusion of polyphony, another conventional element of Pastoral Fiction, although in L’Astrée these voices are ultimately indistinguishable from one another. To advance the plot, and to vary the monotony of the basic narration, writers of Pastoral Fiction used letters, poems, and songs, whose themes echoed those of the primary prose text. D’Urfé, in particular, made extensive use of the letter format, establishing L’Astrée as an early example of French epistolary fiction. The naturally beautiful setting, the themes, and the formal structure of L’Astrée all adhere closely to the basic conventions of pastoral literature. The setting is 5th-century Forez, at once the conventional paradise in its Arcadian, Edenic splendor, but also historically and geographically focused. As is the case in much Pastoral Fiction, the shepherds and shepherdesses are in fact of high birth: their noble ancestors, seeking a haven, had quit the life of the court to retreat to the gentler countryside. L’Astrée’ s strong unifying symbol, adopted from the tradition of courtly literature, is the magical “Fountain of Loves Truth.” If one is reciprocally loved, one will see the beloved’s image reflected in the water along with one’s own. Throughout the story, however, the fountain’s extraordinary powers have been suspended as a result of a spell cast on it by one unfortunate lover. When the fountain may once again display its magical charm, the characters will finally learn their true amorous fate

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