ABSTRACT
One of the most popular anti-pastoral texts in the UK is Tom Stoppard’s much revived 1993 play Arcadia. It is actually a satire about academics who make their careers by researching the pastoral. Schneider’s book collects essays ‘exploring a natural world full of “strange strangers”, an anti-pastoral world full of paradox and mystery and, yes, even horror’. In his Introduction Schneider calls the first section of his book ‘The Dark Side of the American canon’. Raymond Williams reminds us that there are ‘wolves, foxes, locusts and beetles’ in The Idylls, but this is not quite the same as corrective anti-pastoral, which Williams calls ‘counter-pastoral’. Christopher Marlowe actually used the phrase ‘pretty Lambes’ in his classic pastoral of 1600, ‘The passionate Sheepheard to his love’, which was the subject of an early English anti-pastoral satire.
