Pastoral Literature

topoi romanzeschi, reminiscenze epiche e saffiche memorie È un dato critico ormai acquisito che l'ambientazione bucolica e l'eliminazione del viaggio costituiscano le peculiarità più evidenti che contraddistinguono i Pastoralia nell'àmbito della narrativa erotica 1 . Anche per altri aspetti, meno vistosi e proprio per questo efficacemente rivelatori del carattere di sofisticazione della sua prosa, Longo cerca di rinnovare la tradizione letteraria, rielaborando moduli narrativi tipicamente romanzeschi in modo accorto e consapevole. In parecchi casi l'operazione di rinnovamento viene realizzata attraverso una rilettura attenta, e al tempo stesso sottilmente ammiccante, del modello omerico. In altre parole, riportando i topoi romanzeschi direttamente a uno dei loro archetipi fondamentali, l'epos arcaico, Longo ottiene come risultato quello di avviare un processo di sostanziale rivisitazione di alcune abusate tematiche del romanzo.

This paper aims to demonstrate how the historical context of a manuscript can affect our reading of its texts. The case study in this case is London, British Library, MS Arundel 292 and its engagement with pastoral literature, the bestiary tradition, and other texts from Norwich Cathedral Library.

First-year postgraduate thesis, MPhil English Studies (Medieval Period), University of Oxford (2015).

To begin at a beginning, in the tricksterish address that Dylan Thomas made to his “readers, the strangers[,]” in the ‘Author’s Note’ to the 1952 edition of the Collected Poems, he wrote, “I read somewhere of a shepherd who, when asked why he made, from inside tiny fairy rings, ritual observances to the moon to protect his flock, replied: ‘I’d be a damn’ fool if I didn’t!’  These poems with all their crudities, doubts and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn’ fool if they weren’t.”  It could be argued that this parabolic anecdote, written late in Thomas’s short, tragic, career suggests a distorted and distorting vision of his Collected Poems.  In its invocation of the emblematic figure of the pastoral tradition; its conjuring of an incantatory, twilit rurality; and its apparent apology for the unrefined, rustic quality of its imperfect paeans of love and praise to humanity and a personal creator, it seems to present to the “strangers” an oeuvre that appears to have more in common with the late-Romanticism of the Celtic Twilight than with a late modernism of the 1940s and the early 1950s.  Insofar as the generative site for the lexis of the more expansive and lyrical poems that Thomas wrote from 1944 onwards is the natural world, rather than the world of the body, it is perhaps understandable that these late “statements made on the way to the grave[‘]”  as Thomas described them, might be regarded as a retreat from the densely textured and obscure modernist expression of the 1930s’ poems into the clarity of a mature, late- or neo-Romantic lyricism that is rooted in the landscape of rural Carmarthenshire.  Rather than interpreting this lyrical turn towards the natural world as a rejection of modernism as a formal means of negotiating the sublime, terrifying and traumatic reality of modernity, in favour of a realist, confessional poetry of place that proffers the consolation of a pantheistic mode of vision, this paper explores how the poems that Thomas composed in the midst and in the aftermath of the Second World War, and ‘Fern Hill’ in particular, actually demonstrate a modernist appropriation, enactment and performance of a pastoralism that is as perfectly and tragically forlorn as it is textually unstable and incomplete.

This article analyses a corpus of French comic books (including series and one-shots) published since 2010 that share a thematic focus on agriculture. I argue that this mini-explosion in French comics publishing that crosses various generic and reading public boundaries can be viewed as a contemporary iteration of the pastoral. This ever-expanding body of texts is guided by ecocritical preoccupations, through their engagement with terroir. Because of the cultural connotations of terroir in modern and contemporary France, these comics are situated at the intersection of environmentally progressive and culturally conservative discourses.

Sylvia Townsend Warner's early poetry maps her vision of England through a sustained engagement with the pastoral mode in its many variations. Warner's revisions of pastoral more typically involve complex ironies of character, situation and social observation. Such ironies are what make her poems modern, if not straightforwardly modernist. Because of its capacity for social criticism and its power to accommodate ironies, the pastoral mode offers a suggestive way of reading Sylvia Townsend Warner's poetry. Her pastoral modernism is deeply ironic, employing traditional modes and forms to question gender roles and social injustice.