pastoral literature and nature university of helsinki/ comparative literature 3.11.2014 m.a. pekka...
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PastoralLiterature and NatureUniversity of Helsinki/Comparative Literature3.11.2014M.A. Pekka Raittinen
Thomas Cole The Course of an Empire. The Arcadian or Pastoral State 1836First was the Golden Age. Then rectitude spontaneous in the heart prevailed, and faith.
Avengers were not seen, for laws unframed were all unknown and needless. Punishment and fear of penalties existed not.
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Joachim Wtewael The Golden Age 1605
Now the last age by Cumae's Sibyl sungHas come and gone, and the majestic rollOf circling centuries begins anew:Justice returns, returns old Saturn's reign,With a new breed of men sent down from heaven.Only do thou, at the boy's birth in whomThe iron shall cease, the golden race arise,
Virgil , Bucolics, Eclogue IV
The pastoral state or the Golden Age In every culture there is a myth of a Golden
Age; no work; no organized state, no laws etc.
Hesiod Works and Days; The five ages of mankind; The Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age; Heroic Age and present Iron Age
Cyclical view of history => Golden Age will return ( later in Vico, Joyce etc)
Ruled by Cronus (Greek) and Saturn (Roman)
Pastoral poetry of Antiquity Bucolic poetry; Greek βουκολικόν, from
βουκόλος => ”cowherd”; shepherd Theocritus (3rd century BC.) Idylls; =>
bucolics, mimes, epics, epigrams ”Idyll”= ”a small picture”; eidos ”small poem Singing matches between the shepherds The dichotomies country versus city; past
versus present already developed by Theocritus
Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) Eclogues (or Bucolics)
70 – 19 BC. Lived in turbulant Augustan period of Roman history Civil war and land campaign of the Octavian era
=> Virgil’s idyll is already an idyll in peril In Eclogues the trope of Arcadia used for the first
time The fourth Eclogue is a prophesy about the birth
of a boy child and the return of the Golden Age (Virgil’s other works; Georgics and Aeneid)
Later developments The Renaissance Italy; Boccaccio,
Petrarch etc. The English tradition: Sir Philip
Sidney Arcadia, Edmund Spencer The Faerie Queen and Shepheardes Calendar; Alexander Pope Pastorals etc
The sub-genre of pastoral elegy; developed from Theocritus => mourning the death of a friend; John Milton Lycidas; Shelley Adonais
Pastoral theory
In Virgils work; pastoral is already an (somewhat) artificial discourse; own tropes and conventions
Friedrich Schiller: On Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1795)
Frank Kermode, English Pastoral Poetry (1952) => A form of urban nostalgia
Raymond Williams: An idealized version of country life in English modern literature => Class conflict dissimulated
Terry Gifford (1999); three definitions; 1). A form, a genre
of literature 2). A looser term for
describing literature depicting the countryside
3). A pejorative term for idealized and simplified depiction of the countryside
Acccording to Greg Garrard (2004) can be: 1). Elegic; looking
backwards 2). Idyll; the
abundant present 3). Utopia;
obtained in the future
Leo Marx: The Machine in the Garden (1964) Thomas Jefferson;
America as an agrarian utopia
The Shepherd and new a green world
Thoreau ”rapt in a revery” awakens to the sound of steam engine
For Marx ”a middle ground” that combines civilization and wilderness – best of both worlds
Problems?
Ecocritics have been suspicious of pastoral as an idealization of countryside
A (post)modern pastoral; ideal of a garden city / green suburbia => ”back to the nature”; while at the same time ”requiring fantastic amounts of high-technology upkeep” (Wilson 1992)
“ […] a predominantly private landscape controlled by the power and exclusivity of property ownership.” (Bunce 1994
Werner Holmberg: Ideal Landscape, 1860
So-called panoramic motive in Finnish literature, beginning with the national poet Johan Ludvig Runeberg
Runeberg’s hexameterer epic Hanna (1836)
Historian Matti Klinge: ”Idylli ja uhka” (=> ”Idyll in peril”)
In Finnish culture the dichotomy of city and countryside is much less important than in the United States or England
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