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.
Ken Hiltner is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Milton and Ecology and the editor of Renaissance Ecology: Imagining Eden in Milton's England.
Table of Contents
IntroductionPart I. Literary Issues1. The Nature of Art2. What Else Is Pastoral3. What Else Was Pastoral in the Renaissance?4. Pastoral and Ideology, and the EnvironmentPart II. Environmental Problems5. Representing Air Pollution in Early Modern London6. Environmental Protest Literature of the Renaissance7. Empire, the Environment, and the Growth of GeorgicSelect BibliographyIndex
What People are Saying About This
John P. Rumrich
What Else Is Pastoral?, notable for its theoretical sophistication and breadth of reference, is worthwhile precisely because it is humble enough to take representations of the countryside as actually being about the countryside first. Yes, these representations occur in cultural discourses with political implications, but the implications are grounded, literally, in concerns of the earth. Ken Hiltner reads pastoral as about humankind's relationship to the natural world. In What Else Is Pastoral?, he establishes a versatile theoretical basis from which to address Renaissance nature writing and ends with case studies that convincingly establish a payoff.
Robert N. Watson
I read What Else Is Pastoral? with interest, respect, and pleasure. Intelligent and well informed, it is a valuable contribution to a rapidly emerging area of cultural studies. Ken Hiltner looks hard at literature and history and produces thereby some fresh perspectives on literary texts and environmental history alike.
