A RETURN TO THE LANDSCAPE What Else Is Pastoral? Renaissance Literature and the Environment by Ken Hiltner. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Pp. 189. $48.95 cloth.From his monograph's title, we know that Ken Hiltner responds directly to the critical paradigms of the 1980s and 1990s set forth by Paul Alpers and Annabel Patterson that present pastoral as a political genre focused largely on court corruption and dissent. For those of us who were in graduate school in that time and in the decade after, the hold of these paradigms was tight, and Hiltner's focus on the environment that is pastoral is in many ways a relief. His basic premise is that the changes that transpired from the expansion of the city, the increased use of coal, and the filling of the wetlands meant that the landscape was seen with new eyes. As a result, he argues, pastoral actually had to do with the landscape it described, and his argument resonates deeply as we are brought out of the nethersphere of the enclosed court and made to see the countryside once again. It is the sense of return, however, that Hiltner has not quite fully fleshed out, as he responds to a specific decade of criticism without providing a sense of its precursors and the decades since.Hiltner's initiating insight is that, from its inception, the pastoral mode was about marking a shifting relationship to the environment. From the ancients onward, he demonstrates, authors depicted the pastoral landscape in response to its passing, whether in Virgil's loss of his personal agrarian ideal or John Stow's record of the exploding dimensions of London. His deft handling of texts in the original languages and extensive engagement of the early-twentieth-century historical work of London reveal a scholar thoroughly embedded with his materials.The monograph is divided into two parts. The first is purely literary historical as we reexamine defining works of the pastoral canon: Virgil's first eclogue, the English country-house poems (giving equal space to Aemilia Lanyer as to Ben Jonson and Andrew Marvell), and English reworkings of Horace's second epode. Before this survey, however, this section begins with an engagement with Plato and an articulation of the used by authors in representing nature, as that representation could be more than a little daunting (23). That is, rather than describe the landscape in minute, sensorial detail as later writers would, the early moderns nod to the left and right-as if proto-tour guides-at a well-known landscape that is in danger of moving into oblivion. These strategies are then what ties the first section to the second, which-through variously engaging the works of John Taylor the Water Poet, Sir John Denham, Andrew Marvell, and Edmund Spenser-delineates three environmental upheavals-the air pollution of London, the draining of the fens, and the colonization of Ireland-that occasion passionate, sometimes disturbing writings. The last of these, a kind of coda to this analysis, points to the movement out of the pastoral (and with it the gestural) and into the georgic. In the end, though, the gestural provides only a loose tie that virtually disappears in the final chapter, leaving one with a sense of two projects taken on with different motivations and methods-one literary historical, one ecological. In the former, the author seems fully unswerving; in the latter, Hiltner gestures to the environmental project that underpins his work without fully committing to the conversation he enters.In the face of the current critical output, one can certainly understand adopting this strategy. As a result of simple nods to ecological criticism, his prose stays unbrambled by theoretical digressions and scholarly surveys. After all, Hiltner does not set out to engage the present critical landscape, but rather to resurrect and reorient an approach from the last century. …
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Nov 6, 2019
Maria Estellés Arguedas 
Open Access