Pastoral Tradition Research Articles

Dreaming of Dixie: how the South was created in American popular culture

From the late nineteenth century through World War II, popular culture portrayed the American South as a region ensconced in its antebellum past, draped in moonlight and magnolias, and represented by such southern icons as the mammy, the belle, the chivalrous planter, white-columned mansions, and even bolls of cotton. In Dreaming of Dixie , Karen Cox shows that the chief purveyors of this constructed nostalgia for the Old South were outsiders of the region, especially advertising agencies, musicians, publishers, radio personalities, writers, and filmmakers playing to consumers' anxiety about modernity by marketing the South as a region still dedicated to America's pastoral traditions. Cox examines how southerners themselves embraced the imaginary romance of the region's past, particularly in the tourist trade as southern states and cities sought to capitalize on popular perceptions by showcasing their Old South heritage. Only when television emerged as the most influential medium of popular culture did views of the South begin to change, as news coverage of the civil rights movement brought images of violence, protest, and conflict in the South into people's living rooms. Until then, Cox argues, most Americans remained content with their romantic vision of Dixie. |Cox shows that the chief purveyors of nostalgia for the Old South were outsiders of the region, playing to consumers' anxiety about modernity by marketing the South as a region still dedicated to America's pastoral traditions. Cox examines how southerners themselves embraced the imaginary romance of the region's past.

John Gay’s Polly and the Politics of ‘Colonial Pastoral’

In recent years, a number of ‘postcolonial’ readings of John Gay’s Polly have appeared that treat the play as an anti-colonial text. The present essay argues that while colonial practices and ‘colonial discourse’ are satirised on a surface level, the text is less radical than it is sometimes taken to be. Its criticism has to be contextualised in Gay’s multi-levelled genre parody, particularly with regard to the pastoral tradition. Furthermore, Polly does not present Macheath as a race-conscious rebel; and finally, both plotstructure and ending undercut an anti-colonial reading.

Andrew Marvell’s Mower Poems and the Pastoral Tradition

Marvell’s Mower poems uniquely form a suite amidst his recurring essays in pastoral across the Folio of 1681. Scholarship on the Mower poems has sometimes suggested that they form not merely a suite but a sequence. It has likewise viewed the poems as undoubtedly associated, yet not as episodes in the cohesive fashioning of a characterization. This essay suggests that Marvell juxtaposes versions of a mower-persona in order to juxtapose the radically incommensurable or diverse discourses that, for him, now comprise or impinge upon the pastoral tradition. Displaying virtu in the virtuosity of his play with pastoral motifs and hence in the strength with which he reinvents what he has inherited from his predecessors, he engages with the pastoral tradition by way of authorial rivalry refigured as connoisseurship. The result is a suite of poems that explores the heterogeneity and divergences of pastoral in a late-Renaissance world, affirming almost nothing while elegantly and provocatively bringing almost all into question. The Mower poems examine not so much the displacement of a rustic persona as the diffusion of and discursive conflict within the pastoral mode itself.

Reading England: pastoral, elegy and the politics of place in Richard Caddel and Harriet Tarlo

Ric Caddel's poem ‘Fantasia in the English Choral Tradition’ (1987) owes much to the idea of a poetics of place that feels peculiarly English. Its delicate rhythms and musical cadences explore a poetic here-and-now that recalls the there-and-then of a lyric, pastoral tradition (both musical, as in Vaughan Williams' evocation of Thomas Tallis, and poetic, as in the range of English nature poets to which it alludes). This essay argues that Caddel's attention (in this poem, as well as more generally) to things at hand, to living both ‘in’ and ‘for’ poetic ‘contact with the world’, performs an argument about the vital importance of the poet's place in that world. His work asserts, that is, that all things are contingent, that poetic experience is indispensable, that ‘there is no “away”/to sling things to’. Caddel's sense of the place of the poet is, however, not without irony, and it is this sense that the essay further explores in relation to another poet whose work has received very little attention, Harriet Tarlo. Like Caddel, Tarlo's poetry, and especially her sequence ‘Love/Land’ (2001), tests, poetically, the space(s) we occupy. Tarlo's work is written in response to the (Northern) English countryside yet, like Caddel's, its sense of place is complicated – ironized – by the fact that it has learned much about the poetics of place from ‘away’, from American poets such as Pound, Williams and, most particularly, Niedecker. This essay considers, therefore, the implications of this upon the place that poets such as Caddel and Tarlo occupy within an English poetic tradition. It suggests, finally, that their place outside (away from) the English poetic mainstream, and the sparse critical notice they have received, is precisely – and ironically – an index of the attention their poetry gives to very English senses of place and of dwelling poetically.

Das bedrohliche Arkadien: Der Feenhügel in der Theologie und Geschichtsschreibung des Mittelalters

Abstract Medieval literature inherited from the Latin pastoral tradition exemplified by Virgil and others the motif of an ideal landscape, a paradise of shepherds. The Arcadia of classical tradition, inhabited by nymphs, satyrs and the heathen gods, became for the medieval mind a garden of love, where Amor held council (as developed by the French allegorists, for example), or a philosophical paradise, where man was recreated and restored. At the same time, medieval historians and theologians found themselves confronted by a different kind of pagan paradise, namely the famous fairy hill of Romano-Celtic origin, which was inhabited not by fictional, but by real creatures such as elves and fairies. The Church Fathers condemned the fairy hill as a demonic illusion and the fairies as diabolical phantasms. This article will demonstrate that the literary description of the fairy hill in Latin tradition was strongly influenced by the idea of bucolic landscape, although it changed its character significantly: what once had been a literary model, now became a metaphysical reality and a concrete alternative to the contemporary world.

Properties of Whiteness: (Post)Apartheid Geographies in Zoë Wicomb's Playing in the Light

This essay presents a spatial reading of Zoë Wicomb's 2006 novel, Playing in the Light. Beginning with the premise that (social and geographical) space and race have long been intertwined in South Africa, this essay assesses the numerous properties of whiteness represented in Wicomb's text. The argument plays out across three sections: The first explores race in a Cape Town's post-apartheid geography. The second section concerns the meaning of racial passing in the context of apartheid geography, wherein the status of whiteness stands as a form of property itself. The third section considers the geography of the South African pastoral tradition that Wicomb's novel alludes to and challenges; in the process, it directs our attention to the literary production of whiteness in South Africa. In all three registers, I argue, property itself -- often, the possession of land or real-estate —- has been central to the production and reproduction of South African whiteness.

Challenges of assessing the sustainability of (agro)-pastoral systems

Pastoralism is not only a livestock-based livelihood strategy but also a way of life with socio-cultural norms and values, and indigenous knowledge revolving around livestock. Pastoral systems in Africa are facing demographic, economic, socio-political and climatic pressures which are driving many pastoralists into non-livestock based livelihood strategies. The changing contexts in which pastoralists operate raise the issue of the sustainability of pastoral systems in dryland Africa. The specific objectives of this paper are: (i) to identify the challenges of assessing the sustainability of pastoral systems with focus on East and West Africa; (ii) to propose criteria and indicators for sustainability assessment of pastoral systems; and (iii) to demonstrate the diversity of pastoral systems by elaborating on features in East and West Africa with case studies from pastoral communities in both regions, namely Samburu in Kenya and Fakara in Niger. All these objectives are to contribute to the debates on the sustainability of pastoralism. Assessing sustainability of pastoral systems is challenging and complex in view of different aspects that should be addressed over time and at different scales. The main challenges addressed in this paper include purpose and interpretation of sustainability, time dimension and scale, diversity of pastoral systems, inter-relatedness of assessment criteria, comprehensiveness and measurability of indicators. To illustrate the challenges, we proposed a number of criteria based on key systems' components of production, stability, efficiency and resilience. For each criterion, a number of indicators were proposed. The criteria we suggested are inter-related and should not be considered in isolation bearing in mind that sustainability is a composite attribute that integrates several variables. In terms of sustainability of pastoral systems in East and West Africa, the key issues are mobility, livestock diversity, livelihood diversification options, and preservation of pastoral tradition and indigenous knowledge. The degree with which these issues are constraining pastoral production and economy will largely shape the trajectory of sustainability of different pastoral systems in both regions.

Giambologna's giant and the cinquecento villa garden as a landscape of suffering

Jacopo Bonfadio wrote in 1541, when comparing the countryside around Naples to that near Florence: ‘Nature seems to lord with authority, but in ruling everywhere rejoices and laughs’. 1 The abundan...

Eudora Who?: Reception and Reading in Germany

Eudora Who?Reception and Reading in Germany Alison D. Goeller When asked if I would consider researching the German reception of Eudora Welty for the International Centenary Conference in Venice, Italy, I silently groaned. Having lived off and on in Germany for over twenty-five years, I knew from perusing bookstores, talking to professors of American Studies at German universities, and going to American Studies conferences in Europe that Welty is not read much, not taught much, not known much. I have yet to find a single book of hers in any German bookstore for example, though I like to think that if I persisted, I just might come across some dusty copy of Delta Wedding sitting under a pile of used books in a second hand shop. Of course, as much as Welty scholars would like to deny it, Welty is not as well-known or taught as she deserves to be even in the US, except in survey courses where "Why I Live at the P. O." or "A Worn Path" might be included on the syllabus or at universities where professors have a special interest in southern literature. More than once over the years when I have mentioned my dissertation on Welty and the pastoral tradition, I have been asked not who is Eudora Welty, but rather what is Eudora Welty. Even my dissertation director, who taught southern literature at a well-respected east coast university, had written the definitive biography of Thomas Wolfe, and was an eminent scholar in American literature, had not read any of her novels and told me that he knew about her only because his family doctor was a cousin of Welty's. So I must admit that from the start of this project I was reluctant to investigate the German reception of Welty, fearing my sleuthing, which is what my research often felt like, would turn up very little. I started by looking at the availability of German translations of Welty. Steven Bloom, a novelist friend of mine in Heidelberg, suggested I contact Sylvia Morowitz, the German translator of Joyce Carol Oates's work. Morowitz, who confirmed my initial impressions that I would not find Welty in any bookstores, suggested I look at ZVAB.com, an online bookstore in Germany that specializes in used books. Pearl McHaney also put me in touch with Margit Mueller, a former student of hers at Georgia State University, who wrote her thesis on Welty and Alice Walker. Mueller suggested another online bookstore: buchhandel.de. Of course, I also checked [End Page 131] out Amazon.de (the German equivalent of Amazon.com). The following is a description of what is currently available, though as far as I was able to determine, all of the texts except Ein Vorhang aus Grün (A Curtain of Green) are out of print. The first book of Welty's to be published by a German publisher was Die Hochzeit (Delta Wedding) in 1965 by Fischer Bucherei (Frankfurt and Hamburg), translated by Elisabeth Schnack. Schnack also translated Mein Onkel Daniel (The Ponder Heart) for a Swiss publisher, Die Arche, even earlier in 1958. Klett-Cotta, a publishing company in Stuttgart, under their Bibliothek der Moderne series, published a number of Welty's works: Ein Wohltatigkeitsbesuch (A Visit of Charity) in 1983, translated by Susan Schaub and containing "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies," "Why I Live at the P. O.," "Clytie," "Old Mr. Marblehall," "A Curtain of Green," "A Visit of Charity," "The Winds," "The Purple Hat," and "Livvie" and Die Tochter des Optimisten (The Optimist's Daughter), translated by Kai Molvig in 1991. Klett-Cotta also published a collection of Welty's stories under the title Der Purpurrote Hut (The Purple Hat) in 1986, translated by Katrina von Hutten and containing the stories from both A Curtain of Green and The Wide Net; Eine Stimme Finden (One Writer's Beginnings) in 1990, translated by Rudiger Imhoff, which was then published in paperback in 2001 by Munich publisher Bertelsmann; and Der Goldenen Aepfel (The Golden Apples) in 1992, translated by Tamara Willmann. A more recent publication is Der Rauberbrautigan (The Robber Bridegroom) published by Bertelsmann (in paperback) in 2000 and translated...

Urban Nomads of Petra: An Alternative Interpretation of the Bedoul Bedouin’s Relationship with History and Space

Jordan‟s efforts to become a stronger state in the global community have frequently conflicted with the Bedouin population‟s desire to continue its seminomadic and pastoral tradition. The Bedoul, who claim ancestral heritage to the ancient city of Petra, face a complex conflict with the urbanizing state. This paper offers an alternative evaluation of the relationship between the state and seminomadic communities by reexamining historical trends and the Bedoul Bedouin condition through a multi-dimensional analytic, which is inspired by the concept of the global city as defined by Saskia Sassen. By referring to this analytical lens as the “global city aesthetic,” I intend to make use of the analytical method that allowed for the global city to be defined, to make room for the reality of contradictions, and finally, to be sensitive to the imagery and dynamics inspired by the concept of the global city. Furthermore, I hope to demonstrate the ability of this alternative approach to transcend the limitations of historiographical approaches that emphasize divergent over synthetic trends, and thereby to reevaluate conflicts to create space for reconciliation. This analytical method also transcends the temporal hierarchy that overvalues the present and devalues the past by considering historical realities in an assessment of contemporary conditions. Finally, an application to the issue of desertification illustrates the analytic‟s versatility and relevance to a variety of issues.

Pastoral Elegy into Romantic Lyric: Generic Transformation in Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis”

history of English elegy is a pouring of fresh tears into ancient vessels.--John D. Rosenberg, Elegy for an Age (1) It is a commonplace that Arnold is an elegiac poet, but not everyone would agree on what is meant by this phrase. --A. Dwight Culler, Imaginative Reason (2) What kind of a poem is Matthew Arnold's Thyrsis? The answer has seemed self-evident ever since it was published in 1861: it is an elegy, more specifically a pastoral elegy, occasioned by the death of Arnold's friend and fellow poet Arthur Hugh Clough five years earlier in Florence. Thyrsis is the third of the three great pastoral elegies in English poetry, the other two being Milton's Lycidas and Shelley's Adonais. is Thyrsis a pastoral elegy in quite the same way that Lycidas and Adonais are? Over forty years ago, Richard Giannone was not sure that it is: is something of an anomaly among pastoral elegies, he wrote. One could justifiably call it a pastoral elegy manque in so far as Arnold stops considerably short of the kind of complete shaping of the poem according to the pastoral conventions one finds, say, in Spenser's November eclogue or Astrophel, or in 'Lycidas.' (3) Yet no one has followed up on Giannone's questioning of the poem's genre, which continues to seem self-evident to critics. In his still influential study of Arnold's poetry, A. Dwight Culler distinguishes Thyrsis from ScholarGipsy, to which it is frequently compared, by stressing its different generic identity: Scholar-Gipsy, he says, is primarily a Romantic dream-vision which creates an ideal figure who lives outside of time, whereas ['Thyrsis'] is an elegy about a human figure who lived in time and was thereby destroyed (p. 250). David Riede discusses Thyrsis along with Scholar-Gipsy under the heading Pastoral and Elegy, (4) and in the most recent commentary on the poem, Patrick Connolly reiterates the poem's dependence on the long ancestral of pastoral elegy: As a poem 'Thyrsis' falls within the pastoral elegy form, though this may not be obvious at first reading. Consequently it is dependent on a ancestral line of such poetry from Shelley and Milton to Moschus and Theocritus. (5) This unproblematic classification of Thyrsis as a pastoral elegy has ensured that critics, by never looking at the poem from an alternative generic perspective, see only what they habitually expect to find in pastoral elegies instead of seeing what Arnold actually wrote. often think of genre designation as one of the last acts a reader performs-and to some extent it is true that a work's precise generic placement is often unclear until we have finished reading it, says Peter Rabinowitz in Before Reading. But some preliminary generic judgment is always required even before we begin the process of reading. We can never interpret outside generic structures: 'reading'--even reading of a first paragraph-is always 'reading as.' (6) No poem, least of all one assumed to belong to so conventional a form as the pastoral elegy, stands entirely outside generic structures, and so when we read Thyrsis as a pastoral elegy, it is difficult to avoid succumbing to the force of generic conventions, the recognition that it is one of a family of similar poems, and thus to be led very quickly from what the individual work is actually saying to what we assume the generic structure to which it belongs is saying through the work. On the other hand, there is no possibility of not reading intertextually, since no work exists outside generic conventions. So the question Thyrsis presents, then, is not whether to read it intertextually-there is no choice other than to do so-but rather what poems constitute the most relevant and illuminating inter-texts? Or, to pose the question another way: what kind of poem is Thyrsis and in what generic tradition(s) does it participate? Without denying its indisputable affiliations with the pastoral elegy (with Lycidas as its most influential English representative) and with the broader pastoral tradition that Scholar-Gipsy participates in, I propose to argue that the exclusive classification of Thyrsis as a pastoral elegy has prevented us from recognizing that it is, in fact, a generically mixed lyric that combines the conventions of the classical pastoral elegy with the new kind of poem we now identify as distinctively Romantic, the lyric genre that M. …

The Location of Empire: Anne Grant’s Memoirs of an American Lady

Glasgow‐born Anne Grant has recently received critical attention for her Romantic‐era writing on the Scottish Highlands. Her most popular work in the United States, however, was the Memoirs of an American Lady (1808), which recounts Grant’s childhood experiences growing up in colonial upstate New York, where her father, an officer in the British army, was posted. In contrast to recent critical studies that have situated the Memoirs in an American, post‐revolutionary, pastoral tradition, I argue that Grant’s account of her early life is testament to the transnational and transperipheral circuits of movement and exchange in the British Atlantic world, circuits which make for complex instabilities of national, ethnic, and regional identities. Grant’s Memoirs – chronicling a childhood lived among a prominent Dutch family in Albany; Mohawks in the surrounding countryside; and Irish, Scots, and English in her father’s regiment – describes what can be termed a “translocality.” Grant’s childhood world is a polyglot world of indigeneity and emergent and receding empires, a world of confused and shifting allegiances and identities. In this, the Memoirs suggests that the cultural forms ascribed to our contemporary condition of global modernity are also recognizable in earlier stages of modern imperialism.

The Idyllic Sublime

Michael Beckerman and William H. Rosar explore, in dialogue fashion, the role of music in the Western pastoral tradition in film.

“It was my … hanslam”: Agaat as a pastoral evocation of guilt and (possibly) forgiveness

Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat (translated by Michiel Heyns) returns to the genre of the plaasroman and draws on the pastoral tradition and the biblical pastoral in particular. The relationship between the farmer Milla de Wet and her spurned foster daughter, now servant, Agaat Laurier, is reviewed when Milla lies on her death bed. This raises questions about guilt and forgiveness, which are discussed in relation to readings of Ricoeur and Derrida, and the prophet Nathan's parable to David, the shepherd‐king.

‘The (singing) game is not afoot’ – Calpurnius Siculus' sixth eclogue

The following paper focuses on the ‘generic identity’ of Calpurnius Siculus' sixth eclogue; in particular the article examines the ways in which the Neronian poet manages to suggest his ‘generic novelty’, his willingness to expand on the previous pastoral tradition as well as his occasional tendency to perpetuate and further generate ‘generic tensions’ already operating in earlier bucolic poetry. Intertextuality thus appears to function as a major means that Calpurnius makes use of in order to bring out his ‘generic diversity’, for most of the intertexts display a ‘generic interaction’ between various literary genres, further adding to the ‘generic polyphony’ evidenced throughout the Calpurnian pastoral corpus.

Aspects of Pastoral in Sylvia Plath's 'Child'

This article considers Sylvia Plath's late poem, ‘Child’, in terms of its relations with some pastoral motifs and conventions. In particular, Plath's use of floral imagery in her many presentations of children locates the work in a pastoral tradition which includes, for example, Marvell and Blake, but is closer in its depiction of landscape, and in register, to the early Americans Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet. Plath's use of the unusual wildflower, the Indian pipe, references not only the American landscape, but also the work of Emily Dickinson. Plath's interest in the eye-like form of the Indian pipes suggests, also, an engagement with Emerson, but her dystopian anti-pastoral vision reverses Emersonian optimism. ‘Child’ is not simply, or not solely, an untroubled blessing for a child. Drawing on the heightened sense of both function and artifice associated with pastoral elegy, Plath allows her writing to register the fact that her poetry may be unable to do any good, or may even to do harm. The salient point is not that ‘Child’ was written so close to her death, but that it is a post-Ariel poem representing an impressive development from what is, anyway, a remarkable volume.

Nationalism and the Farm Novel in South Africa, 1883–2004*

From Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) to Van Niekerk's Agaat (2004), the farm novel has reflected South Africa's experience of colonial conflict, white supremacy, gender struggle and nationalism. Revisited at key historical moments, the farm novel describes a deterministic relationship between genre and ideology, drawing attention to the role a particular fictional mode has played in justifying the disenfranchisement of blacks and the disempowerment of women. The social context in which the Afrikaans farm novel developed was one of emerging Afrikaner nationalism; it lent credibility to a story about Afrikaners' rural origins that provided an illusion of continuity in South African history and a description of an unchanging Afrikaner identity. Since the 1960s, leftist Afrikaans writers, concerned with the role the early farm novel played in promoting white supremacy, have rewritten it in order to deconstruct its themes and tropes. J.M. Coetzee's English-medium challenge to the farm novel genre, in his fiction and elsewhere, can be viewed in this context. Increasingly, since the end of apartheid, feminist versions of the genre have articulated connections between nationalist ideology, the canon and the representation of gender. I view recent rewritings by Marlene van Niekerk, particularly, as a challenge to both literary convention and racist-masculinist ideology. Her work draws attention to the genre's importance in describing the relationship between white supremacy and land ownership; moreover, it proposes new directions for the study of pastoral traditions in South African writing.

Why Kendal? John Thelwall, Laker Poet?

In November, 1803, Citizen John Thelwall, the once-notorious Jacobin orator, stopped at Grasmere and Keswick on his way to Scotland to deliver elocutionary lectures. According to biographers, this visit marked the definitive end of Thelwall's friendship with Wordsworth and Coleridge, and of their radical years. Thelwall sank into obscurity as an elocutionist and pedagogue, and Wordsworth and Coleridge rose to become the foremost poet-critics of their generation. I have been working to fill in the blanks in Thelwall's virtually undocumented later career, a quest crowned by my discovery in 2004 of both his hidden hermitage in Llyswen, Wales, and a one-thousand-page manuscript of his complete poems, never known to have existed, in Derby. These discoveries prove that Thelwall's poetry is more ambitious and original than he has been given credit for, that his connections with the Wordsworth Circle are more extensive and long-lived, and that his 1803 visit to the District was not a chance event. Not merely passing through, Thelwall had recently settled his family in nearby Kendal, where they would remain for over a year, where he would return between lecture tours, and where he would write poetry that continues the formative dialogue with Wordsworth and Coleridge that began in 1796. (1) Not counting work towards his ambitious but unfinished epic The Hope of Albion, Thelwall wrote at least twenty-five poems between 1803 and 1805, most intended for the unpublished volume of Wordsworthian Poems, Chiefly Suggested by the Scenery of Nature that makes up the core of the Derby manuscript, and appears to originate at this time. (2) My paper draws on this manuscript (which I am editing) as well as research into Kendal social history (including evidence of the reception of Thelwall's lectures), to answer my title question. Why did Thelwall choose Kendal? What does his residence there mean for his own poetry, and that of the Lake School (which was tarred by Thelwall's brush with Jeffrey in Edinburgh)? What kind of poetry did he deliver to the citizens of Kendal, and how was he received? How does Romantic poetry look when viewed from the perspective of a market town on the dissenting margins of the District rather than a rustic cottage at its loyal shepherd's heart? If English Romanticism is forever associated with District, then Kendal like Thelwall is forever knocking on its door. This gateway to the Lakes (3) is a market town and transportation hub now famous not for literary but consumer landmarks, from mint cake to shoes. Two hundred years ago, Kendal was not so different: when the town is mentioned in the lives of the poets, it is as a place to catch the London coach, or to purchase books and commodities (like the famous 'black drop' opium) not available locally. In short, Kendal then as now was a place of mobility, sociability and commerce, a threshold or bridge between the pastoral tradition and tranquility that Wordsworth sought out and celebrated in his poetry, and the rapidly growing mill towns and mass markets that he wrote his poetry in opposition to, but still depended on, in that uneasy relationship between literary and popular culture that also defines Romanticism. Kendal was a threshold. in social structure as well. Unlike the mountain heart of the District, where the sturdy self-reliance of Wordsworth's idealized shepherds was rooted in a quasi-feudal deference to the high-and-mighty Lowther interest, Kendal was characterized by the political independence and class mobility that marked the emergent northern powerhouses of this industrial revolutionary age. According to social historians, Kendal's historical lack of resident gentry and nobility (Brown 3), along with its large number of skilled artisans and independent tradesmen, and the fact that its leading families were dissenters, Quakers and Methodists, all meant that Kendal was never an established county town (Dyhouse 4-5. …

Ian Macpherson's Writing of the Disaster

The Scottish Renaissance novelist Ian Macpherson is rarely considered within either Scottish or British contexts. This discussion of his novels demonstrates that they simultaneously serve both as reworkings of the pastoral tradition and as documents of what Maurice Blanchot calls the disaster. Offering a close reading of the novels themselves, focusing on Macpherson’s final novel, Wild Harbour, as well as a comparison with the more celebrated work of D.H. Lawrence, this article argues that Macpherson deserves significant reappraisal as both exemplars of the Scottish Renaissance tradition and as philosophically-engaged approaches to modernity.

Zarzuela and the Pastoral

Zarzuela and the Pastoral Lucy D Harney The pastoral mode has traditionally been understood to sentimentalize, even mythologize, ideas, objects and phenomena associated with the rural landscape, often contrasting the bucolic and the urban, irrespective of literary or artistic genre. Throughout the centuries, “Arcadia was forever being rediscovered,” asserts Ernst R. Curtius, because the stock of pastoral motifs was “bound to no genre and to no poetic form” (187). Thus, they were adaptable by Greek romance, eclogue, drama, and Renaissance chivalric and sentimental romance (187). The influence of pastoral in Western literature is deeply rooted and pervasive. Indeed, from the first century of the Roman Empire down to the time of Goethe, the study of Latin literature began, notes Curtius, with Virgil’s first eclogue (190). The present study seeks to situate the works of late nineteenth-century Spanish zarzuela—including those with urban settings and characters—within the pastoral tradition. Pivotal to all pastoral formulations is an exaltation of that which is ostensibly close to nature. Whether characterized mythically as a Golden Age in which, as Alexander Pope (I, 15) maintained, “the best of men follow’d the employment [of shepherd]”; or located, as by the “moderns,” in the promise of contemporary rural life; or conceived, as by many Romantics, as a manifestation of untarnished and exemplary Nature itself, the pastoral world is typically contrasted to a morally compromised urban universe. Pastoral, in its various presentations, resists unequivocal definitions or rigid descriptions. As Annabel Patterson points out, pastoral, like other “strong literary forms,” propagates “by miscegenation” (7). What matters, then, is not to define pastoral but to delineate and analyze how it is put to use by “writers, artists, and intellectuals . . . for a range of functions and [End Page 252] intentions” (Patterson 7). To the degree that our focus is the pastoral work of specific authors, in a specific period of national or regional literary history, we must, as Paul Alpers argues, account for “the range and variety of pastoral writings as they present themselves historically” (12). Accordingly, the “relation of literary works to their predecessors” is of the utmost importance in our discussion (Alpers 12). Spanish literary history offers many examples of pastoral: the framing locus amoenus of Berceo’s Milagros; the Libro de buen amor’s mock-pastoral serrana episodes; Fray Luis’s Vida retirada; Garcilaso’s melancholy swains Salicio and Nemoroso; Antonio de Guevara’s witty and mordant contrast of court and village; Laurencia’s elogy of country life in Lope’s Fuenteovejuna; Jorge de Montemayor’s recasting of Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe (the basis of the plot of Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona); Cervantes’s Galatea; his Grisóstomo’s unrequited love for Marcela, the eloquently reluctant shepherdess (Don Quijote I, xii–xiv); Góngora’s dreamy and profound Soledades; his baroque reworking of Ovid in Polifemo y Galatea.1 Don Quijote’s’ Golden Age meditation, declaimed before uncomprehending goatherds (I, xi), rehearses several pastoral conventions. That “dichosa edad y siglos dichosos a quien los antiguos pusieron nombre de dorados,” expressing Hesiodic nostalgia, exalts the simple, earthly contentment of man’s unfettered communion with Nature, while mournfully situating the golden age in an irrecoverable past, as would Pope and the “ancients.” Don Quijote’s soliloquy expresses another pastoral topos, derived from Hesiod’s Works and Days: the appealing vision (so influential in later formulations of pre-lapserian themes) of the spontaneously-productive natural world in which, as Don Quijote expresses it, “a nadie le era necesario para alcanzar su ordinario sustento tomar otro trabajo que alzar la mano, y alcanzarle de las robustas encinas que liberalmente les estaban convidando con su dulce y sazonado fruto” (I, xi). According to Don Quijote’s Golden Age reverie, “entonces los que en ella vivían, ignoraban estas dos palabras de ‘tuyo’ y ‘mío.’ Eran . . . todas las cosas en comunes” (I, xi). With this image of effortless abundance Cervantes invokes the egalitarian notion of common property, traced by Raymond Williams from Virgil to Spenser and Chapman (42–43). The pastoral life as haven, with its Western roots in Horace and Virgil, [End Page 253] is likewise a commonplace of Spanish literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth...