Starting with William Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral (1935),
literary critics have been fascinated by the political dynamics of pastoral
texts, which were popular between the 16th and 18th centuries but have never
entirely disappeared. Offering much more than idyllic landscapes and lovesick
shepherds, pastoral texts construct experimental scenarios that probe social
power structures and question notions of home, exile and displacement. They
stage social roles and disguises, and routinely present symbolic ‘rites of
passage’ that challenge identities (age, class, gender) on many levels. From
the very beginnings of pastoral writing, i.e., the eclogues of Theocritus and
Virgil, its settings and characters were self-conscious literary devices,
making the pastoral the ideal testing ground for metafictional investigations
into authorial creativity, fact and fiction, point of view, and
transformation/metamorphosis. The New Historicist critic Louis Montrose even
claimed that “modern theories of pastoral have a way of turning into theories
of literature”. Most of our reading will be poetry – by Christopher Marlowe,
Walter Raleigh, Ben Jonson, John Donne, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Andrew
Marvell, John Milton, James Thomson, and Alexander Pope. We will also read
(parts of) Philip Sidney’s pastoral novel The Old Arcadia
(1580) and William Shakespeare’s pastoral play As
You Like It (1598). Time permitting, we will discuss more recent
revivals of the pastoral mode in poetry by Dylan Thomas, Norman MacCaig,
Charles Tomlinson and Seamus Heaney, as well as postcolonial versions of the
pastoral and the continuing importance of the pastoral myth for ideologies of
Englishness (‘the English countryside’, heritage culture).
Texts: Philip Sidney, TheOld Arcadia, ed. Katherine
Duncan-Jones (Oxford University Press, 1994); Ben Jonson, The Oxford Poetry Library: Ben Jonson,
ed. Ian Donaldson (Oxford University Press, 1995); William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Juliet
Dusinberre, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd Series (Thomson Learning, 2006); Andrew
Marvell, The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth
Story Donno (Penguin, 2005); John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems,
ed. John Carey, 2nd ed. (Longman, 1997).–
Additional excerpts via GRIPS.
Requirements: active participation,
an oral presentation / a team-teaching session, and a final
exam (21 July 2025).
