Pastoral literature
Articles
- A New Version of Pastoral: Developments in Michael Wilding’s Fiction
Michael Wilding's Pacific Highway is his pastoral romance; a true descendant of Longus's Daphnis and Chloe and similar antique prose narratives, incorporating Theocritan and Arcadian…
1 October 1983 - Introduction: Why Pastoral?
Why pastoral indeed. Why should what Paul Alpers calls a ‘notoriously conventional’ (79) form of imaginative expression be attracting the interest of writers and scholars…
30 June 2015 - Why the ‘Pathetic Fallacy’ Isn’t One: Early Modern Vitalism and the Emotions of Nature in Shakespeare and Milton
This essay explores possible connections between modern scientific investigation of nature and the portrayal of affective communities in King Lear and Paradise Lost.
30 June 2015 - Pastoral Retreat and Green Texts: The 2009 Globe Production of Love’s Labour’s Lost
Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594–1595) engages with ideas intrinsic to pastoral, particularly the notion of retreat from central urbanity to an alternative space, and the…
30 June 2015 - The Practice of Pastoral Empathy in Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain Poems
In Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain (1793–94) and Adventures on Salisbury Plain (1795–99) the poet’s sense of the congruence of human mind and nature is aligned to…
30 June 2015 - Representation and Particularity in Pastoral: Some Examples from Walden
In this essay, I read Thoreau’s aspirations to public attention as an instance of the literary pastoral. This may seem a back-to-front approach to a…
30 June 2015 - Nude Bathing Scenes as an Australian Pastoral Mode: Strategies and Tactics in Australian Art around the Turn of the Twentieth Century
My main concern in this essay is with a group of pictures of nude bathers painted by Tom Roberts, Charles Conder, Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin…
30 June 2015 - A Pastoral Reading of Christina Stead’s Cotters’ England
With specific reference to Virgil’s Eclogues, Paul Alpers argues that ‘the poetics of pastoral can tell us something about poetics in general’ (The…
30 June 2015 - Wildness and Wilderness: Anti-pastoralism and the Problematic Politics of Edward Abbey
Edward Abbey was one of the most important and controversial figures in twentieth-century American environmental literature. Desert Solitaire (1968), his account of his time as…
30 June 2015 - Amanda Lohrey's Vertigo: An Australian Pastoral
This essay is grounded in William Empson’s view of the pastoral tradition as deeply concerned with social relations – with how we live in the…
30 June 2015 - Barbara Kingsolver’s Singing Shepherd: The Lacuna as Pastoral Elegy
Since the 1990s, the number of novelists of ideas writing in English who have chosen the humanistic literary tradition broadly termed pastoral as a generic…
30 June 2015 - Ecopastoralism: Settler Colonial Pastoral Imaginary in the US West and Australian Outback
As Lawrence Buell has observed, the pastoral, which in the ‘old’ worlds of Europe was a type of symbolic allegory not expected to be taken…
30 June 2015
Contributors
- Xanthe Ashburner
- Ruth Blair
- Victoria Bladen
- Thomas Bristow
- Ruth Blair
- Bruce A. Clunies Ross
- Kerry Heckenberg
- William Lane
- Tom Lynch
- Leah S. Marcus
- Michael Potts
- Judith Seaboyer