ABSTRACT
The antipastoral constructs a landscape of fear, but unlike the dark pastoral, it is a rejection of the possibility of pastoral. It is defensive-sometimes an exploration of the denial of childhood fears and fears of children, sometimes a denial of the fear itself. It is about the dislocation of childhood, children severed from the world of adults, or the child part of the adult from a more acceptable adult self. It is an imaginative disconnection, a landscape of isolation. It may encompass the grotesque, as in the dark pastoral; however, it is approached indirectly and from a distance. Poetically, it relies on humor and irony. Its connection with childhood goes back to Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear and the world of nonsense they created.
