Chapter 2 - Pastoral

Summary

In “Pastoral,” Terry Gifford traces the development of pastoral literature from the classical genre established by Theocritus’ Idylls and Virgil’s Eclogues to its broader use as a literary mode by writers like Shakespeare, Pope, and Wordsworth. He also examines modern iterations of the “post-pastoral” by writers like Seamus Heaney and Adrienne Rich. Attentive to its ideological valences, Gifford examines the persistence of the pastoral mode in literary representations of the relationship between nature and culture, even as authors resist pastoral idealization. The chapter concludes with an overview of what Gifford calls the “prefix-pastoral” (e.g., postmodern pastoral, Black pastoral, feminist pastoral, etc.) in order to capture the diversity of contemporary pastoral literature and theory.