ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that pastoral’s demarcations of space and the patterns of movement that it shapes are crucial to the understanding of nature and the relationships between people and place that define contemporary British nature writing. Pastoral habits of mind are used self-reflectively to explore attitudes towards different environments and conceptions of the elements of their composition. Paul Farley and Michael Simmons Roberts’s resistance to the conventional idyll of pastorally-inflected nature writing is presaged by their own experiences of the intersection of the urban and the rural in childhood. Key aspects of pastoral – the movement of retreat and return, the division of the landscape along human or natural categorisations – are central to the examination of human–nature relations and the exploration of ecological consciousness that is taking place in contemporary British nature writing. The appeal and the effects of these aspects of pastoral are carefully engaged, and tentatively negotiated.
