ABSTRACT
Pastoral’s reflexivity is central to this position: enabling the mode to adapt and develop, and to support the complex understandings that are demanded of contemporary human–natural environments. Throughout its long history, the pastoral has offered a frame for literature in times of transition: a critical and creative apparatus to work through the political, social, economic, and ecological demands of its writing. In new pastoral writing, the mode is used to work through disorienting effects and dislocating losses of anthropogenic environmental change. In contemporary British writing, the pastoral is used to represent and to reflect on environmental crisis. There is also a sense of hope that can be picked up in the treatment of environmental responsibility in several examples of new pastoral writing. The chapter also presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book.
