Literary nature and socio-environmental reality in early modern French critical writing about the pastoral

Abstract

Seventeenth-century French authors produced some of the first critical works devoted entirely to the pastoral. In this article, the author argues that examining these critical works allows us to add a socio-environmental layer to our understanding of this literary mode. This article explores Rapin’s Dissertatio de carmine pastorali (1659) and Fontenelle’s Discours sur la nature de l’églogue (1688). As they debate which aspects of rural life should be included or excluded from this classical literary form, Rapin and Fontenelle give centre stage to a problem raised in later class-conscious as well as ecocritical critiques: idealized representations of rural spaces have the capacity to hide the issues of social and environmental change. This article focuses on how their theories of the pastoral address this problem. While the challenges of rural labour and environmental change may be obscured by pastoral fiction, they are given visibility in critical writing about this literary mode.