ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a brief analysis of some of the ideologically diverse inflections of romantic pastoral conventions within the homosexual literary imaginary; a project with obvious connections with those of other essayists in this volume concerned with how sexual identities are shaped within rural/metropolitan dialectics. It has broad affinities with that area of recent cross-disciplinary critical studies concerned with cultural linkages between rurality and sexuality cited in the opening paragraphs of David Bell’s contribution (Chapter 5), and to which his earlier collaborative work on lesbian and gay ruralist culture is itself a valuable contribution (Bell and Valentine 1995). Whilst Richard Phillips’ not unrelated essay in the present volume (Chapter 6) examines two specific examples of the relations between social practice-specifically legislation-and cultural signification, like Bell, my concern is primarily with cultural signification, predominately in early twentieth-century literary texts, although a framing example from recent gay cinema in particular gestures towards related pastoral conventions in the visual arts.
