Pastoral

Pastoral is often considered to be a dead mode. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics informs us that Wordsworth’s “Michael” (1800) “well marks the end of serious attempts in the genre” (“Pastoral” 1993, 887), while The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse locates the end of pastoral slightly later, with the early-nineteenth-century “peasant poet” John Clare. Indeed, John Barrell and John Bull, the editors of the Penguin anthology, insist that a contemporary revival of pastoral “is not… something that can be looked for with anything other than alarm. For today, more than ever before, the pastoral vision simply will not do” (1975, 432). A survey of recent scholarship, however, suggests that “pastoral”—a term that traditionally designates poetry and drama that offer a nostalgic and idealized portrayal of the life of shepherds and their rural surroundings—is defined not so much by its obsolescence as by its persistence. Such studies track the continuing reinvention of pastoral in a variety of British, American regional, and postcolonial contexts (James and Tew 2009; Rieger 2009; Cella 2010; Barillas 2006; Potts 2011; Huggan and Tiffin 2010). In a second critical trend, other scholars advance “green readings” of canonical examples of the tradition to show, for instance, how Renaissance pastoral aligns with modern ecocriticism (Borlik 2011; Hiltner 2011).