The Modern Pastoral

The pastoral, according to Lawrence Buell, is a mode that "celebrates the ethos of nature / rurality over against the ethos of the town or city." While this course briefly introduces students to the origins of the pastoral in antiquity and its development in the Renaissance, its focus is on nineteenth- to twentieth-century versions of the pastoral. How did the Romantic emphasis on mental landscapes re-shape the pastoral? Did the maturing of agrarian capitalism impact the mode in the Victorian period? What kinds of pastoral narratives does environmentalism produce? We will address such questions as read poetry by William Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, Ted Hughes, and Gillian Clarke, fiction by Thomas Hardy, and nature-writing by John Muir.