Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Pastoral literature, English.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

'There is probably no single quality or characteristic - besides love of the countryside - that must inevitably distinguish a rural writer,' notes W.J. Keith. However, 'what distinguishes rural writing that belongs to literature from that belonging to natural history, agricultural history, etc., is, as Richard E. Haymaker has observed, the writer's "means of revealing Nature as well as describing her"...In the final analysis the rural essayist paints neither landscapes nor self-portraits; instead he communicates the subtle relationship between himself and his environment, offering for our inspection his own attitudes and his own vision. We may be asked to look or to agree, but more than anything else we are invited to share. Ultimately, then, the best rural writing may be said to provide us, in a phrase adapted from Robert Langbaum, with a prose of experience.' Keith argues that non-fiction rural prose should be recognized as a distinct literary tradition that merits serious critical attention. In this book he tests the cogency of thinking in terms of a 'rural tradition,' examines the critical problems inherent in such writing, and traces significant continuities between rural writers. Eleven of the more important and influential writers from the seventeenth century to modern times come under individual scrutiny: Izaak Walton, Gilbert White, William Cobbett, Mary Russell Mitford, George Borrow, Richard Jefferies, George Sturt/'George Bourne', W.H. Hudson, Edward Thomas Williamson, and H.J. Massingham.In examining these writers within the context of the rural tradition, Keith rescues their works from the literary attic where they have too often been relegated as awkward misfits. When studied together, each throws fascinating light on the others and is seen to fit into a loose but nonetheless discernible 'line.'

English prose literature --- Pastoral literature, English --- History and criticism.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Pastoral literature, English. --- English literature --- History and criticism.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Drama --- anno 1400-1499 --- anno 1500-1599 --- Pastoral literature, English. --- Pastoral literature, European.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

The 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.

Thematology --- English literature --- anno 1500-1599 --- anno 1600-1699 --- Ecology in literature. --- Nature in literature. --- Pastoral literature, English --- Nature in poetry --- History and criticism.