ABSTRACT
In contemporary British writing, new versions of pastoral are emerging in response to environmental crisis. New versions of pastoral are concerned not only with ideas of nature, the rural, or even ‘the environment’, then, but with the interrelated cultural factors that impinge upon those ideas, and newly, with the effects of those ideas themselves. Framed through the pastoral, attention comes to focus upon the ways that the relationships between people and place are communicated and considered. As ecocriticism developed, the possibilities and the limitations of pastoral were well worked over. In British criticism, though, the contrasts between the conventions of pastoral and the cultural and ecological conditions of the country were understood quite differently. For some critics, the iterations of pastoral, and the shifts in form and effect that distinguish them from earlier versions, demand a shift in terminology. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
