ABSTRACT
Pastoral’s complicated legacy, and its relationship to the contemporary environmental concerns that have inspired its resurgence, have shaped the new versions of the mode that are appearing in British writing in the twenty-first century. In John Barrell and John Bull’s formulation, then, pastoral written in response to environmental concerns would deliberately construct a contrasting alternative vision with no intention of addressing the issues from which it originates. Environmentally-oriented pastoral writing so conceived effectively upscales Alexander Pope’s description of the evasive practices and idealising functions of pastoral. Greg Garrard offers some useful context to the limitations of Jonathan Bate’s account of pastoral, pointing out that ‘Romantic nature is never seriously endangered’. The notion that the experience of the pastoral world can be illuminative, instructive, or transformatory is reinvigorated but also complicated. Ideas of ecology that correspond to pastoral are outmoded, and ideas of pastoral that reflect them are, too.
