What else is pastoral? : Renaissance literature and the environment

Resource Information

The work What else is pastoral? : Renaissance literature and the environment represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of San Diego Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

What else is pastoral? : Renaissance literature and the environment

Title remainder

Renaissance literature and the environment

Statement of responsibility

Ken Hiltner

Creator

• Hiltner, Ken

Author

• Hiltner, Ken

Subject

• Ecology in literature
• Ecology in literature
• Ekologi i litteraturen
• Electronic books
• Engels
• Engelsk litteratur -- historia -- renässansen
• English literature -- Early modern
• English literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism
• Herdediktning -- historia -- England -- renässansen
• 1500-1700
• LITERARY CRITICISM -- European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
• Milieu
• Nature in literature
• Nature in literature
• Naturen i litteraturen
• Pastoral literature, English
• Pastoral literature, English -- History and criticism
• Herdersliteratuur
• Criticism, interpretation, etc

Genre

• Electronic books
• Criticism, interpretation, etc

Language

eng

Summary

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

Cataloging source

E7B

Index

index present

Language note

In English

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

• dictionaries
• bibliography