Pastoral was one of the most popular literary forms of early
modern England. Inspired by classical and Italian Renaissance
antecedents, writers from Ben Jonson to John Beaumont and Abraham
Cowley wrote in idealized terms about the English countryside. It
is often argued that the Renaissance pastoral was a highly
figurative mode of writing that had more to do with culture and
politics than with the actual countryside of England. For decades
now literary criticism has had it that in pastoral verse, hills and
crags and moors were extolled for their metaphoric worth, rather
than for their own qualities. In What Else Is Pastoral?,
Ken Hiltner takes a fresh look at pastoral, offering an
environmentally minded reading that reconnects the poems with
literal landscapes, not just figurative ones.
Considering the pastoral in literature from Virgil and Petrarch
to Jonson and Milton, Hiltner proposes a new ecocritical approach
to these texts. We only become truly aware of our environment, he
explains, when its survival is threatened. As London expanded
rapidly during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the city
and surrounding rural landscapes began to look markedly different.
Hiltner finds that Renaissance writers were acutely aware that the
countryside they had known was being lost to air pollution,
deforestation, and changing patterns of land use; their works
suggest this new absence of nature through their appreciation for
the scraps that remained in memory or in fact. A much-needed
corrective to the prevailing interpretation of pastoral poetry,
What Else Is Pastoral? shows the value of reading
literature with an ecological eye.
Subjects: Language & Literature
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