The New Pastoral in Contemporary British Writing 223
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THE NEW PASTORAL IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH WRITING DEBORAH LILLEY Royal Holloway, University of London PhD Thesis DECLARATION OF ACADEMIC INTEGRITY I hereby declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Deborah Lilley 2 ABSTRACT This thesis examines the appearance of pastoral in contemporary British writing and argues that a transformed version of pastoral can be seen to emerge in the period since 1990 in relation to ecological considerations. The work addresses the proposition that the representation and interpretation of environmental concerns calls up new circumstances for the pastoral to operate within, posing both an opportunity for the application of the conventions of the mode, and a threat to the principles upon which they are based. Analysing work by Robert Macfarlane, Roger Deakin, Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, Ali Smith, Jim Crace, Kathleen Jamie, Liz Jensen, Brian Clarke, Christopher Hart and John Burnside, the thesis explores both pastoral responses to ecological concerns and the impact of ecological concerns upon the form and scope of the pastoral, contending that in these examples, the pastoral is necessarily altered by their intersection. The thesis begins with a theoretical exposition of the premises of the work, locating the emergence of new versions of pastoral in relation to the legacies of the tradition, the development of environmental criticism and the influence of environmental anxieties upon recent British writing. Three thematic chapters then each identify a key aspect of the pastoral tradition employed and transformed in contemporary writing. The first, ‗Escape into Nature‘, examines the ways that the pastoral dynamic of retreat into nature is approached as a response to environmental uncertainty using narratives of estrangement and reconciliation. The second, ‗Pastoral Relations‘, discusses the treatment of the pastoral relationships between conceptions of urban and the rural and the human and the natural alongside environmental concerns. The third chapter, ‗Crises in Pastoral‘, analyses the uses of pastoral in contemporary writing inspired by environmental crises. The final chapter concludes the study and argues that as the certainties of pastoral are called up and challenged by cognisance of environmental uncertainties in contemporary British writing, the key components of the mode are reimagined and reshaped. These adaptations mark new contemporary versions of the mode, provoking fresh consideration of the possibilities, as well as the limitations, of pastoral writing in relation to ecological concerns. 3 CONTENTS Acknowledgements 5 Introduction 6 1. Pastoral and Ecology in Contemporary British Writing 14 2. Pastoral Care: Retreat into Nature 56 3. Natural Connections: Pastoral Relations 109 4. Uncertain Nature: Crises in Pastoral 171 5. The New Pastoral in Contemporary British Writing 223 Bibliography 231 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Royal Holloway and the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the generous funding for my PhD, and Royal Holloway for the College Masters Studentship in English. At Royal Holloway, I have benefitted from a research environment filled with interesting people, provoking ideas and wonderful opportunities. Robert Eaglestone has been an inspiring and patient PhD supervisor and I‘d like to thank him for the support, insight and encouragement he has offered since my MA. I‘d also like to mention Daniel O‘Gorman and Xavier Marco del Pont: running the Literary and Critical Theory Seminar together has been a welcome and engaging addition to my time as a research student, and the source of some great friendships and engaging research. Additionally, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment for the UK and Ireland has been an invaluable resource and support to my studies and introduced me to many excellent people and interesting ideas. I would also like to thank Thomas Woodman, who first sparked my interest in the pastoral during my undergraduate degree at Reading University, and whose encouragement set me on the way to my postgraduate studies at Royal Holloway. I wish to thank my family and friends for their generosity, kindness and support during my studies, especially my parents, Chris and Catherine, and my husband, James, for their understanding and unwavering conviction. 5 The New Pastoral in Contemporary British Writing Introduction This wholly new conception of the precariousness of our relations with nature is bound to bring forth new versions of pastoral.1 Leo Marx This study argues that the pastoral is used in contemporary British writing to represent and to reflect upon environmental concerns, and that in the process, adaptations are made to the conventions of the mode. Identifying these adaptations and their impact upon the form and effects of the pastoral in this context, this thesis argues that new versions of the mode can be seen to emerge. In so doing, this study brings together a corpus of recent British writing which displays direct and sustained interest in the surroundings that they depict, or more specifically, in the ways that those surroundings are imagined and perceived, and what the implications and effects of these interpretations may be. Using the pastoral mode to access conceptions of and relations to their environments, these texts both adopt and question its themes and conventions to represent and to reflect upon the ways that their environments may be understood. Analysing these uses of pastoral, this thesis argues that the mode itself is found in new configurations in these instances. I will begin by addressing the terms of these propositions. This thesis explores the appearance of environmental concerns in contemporary British writing through the framework of the pastoral mode, and identifies the ways that the form of that framework is orchestrated around those concerns. As I will discuss in depth in the next chapter, neither the content nor outcomes of pastoral are certain, and both critical and creative interpretations of the mode offer various and conflicting accounts of its defining form. However, in this study the pastoral is recognised by a number of identifying characteristics that may be arranged in differing ways and to differing effects according to the concerns to which it responds. These distinctively pastoral characteristics are found in the mode‘s themes and conventions, which represent a central core that appears 1 Leo Marx, ‗Does Pastoralism Have a Future?‘ in John Dixon Hunt, ed. The Pastoral Landscape (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1992), p. 222. 6 across generic and formal boundaries. Thematically, the pastoral is concerned with conceptions of ‗the human‘ and ‗the natural‘, and their interstices and interrelations, which extend to the identification and relative understanding of places, times and attitudes associated with these conceptions. These themes find expression through a series of interlinking relationships, formed of both connections and contrasts, between these extended conceptions. The conventions of pastoral rely on the tensions between ideas of the human and the natural, the urban and the rural, and the past and the present. These tensions are maintained by the perspectives attributed to these ideas, and by the possibility of productively moving between them in order to obtain relief, insight or a combination of both. Accordingly, the pastoral offers methods of orientation, of relatively mapping places, times, expectations and responses according to particular patterns of thought or understanding. It is the ways that these core components of the pastoral are arranged in contemporary British writing, and the ways that these arrangements are treated, that signal the new approaches to the mode uncovered by this study. As I will discuss later, the correlation between the themes and conventions of the pastoral, and the leanings towards which they may be moulded, have been variously interpreted throughout the mode‘s long history. Here, it is the impact of contemporary environmental conditions upon those correlations and orientations, and the concerns that such conditions raise in relation to the themes of the pastoral that underpin them that is under scrutiny. In the texts examined in the following chapters, awareness of changing environmental conditions due to interrelated ecological, economic, industrial and political factors are registered through, for instance, the evidence of pollution, the contemporary and potential causes and effects of climate change, and the shifting uses and habitation of particular places by humans and non-humans alike. These issues raise concerns over the effects of human actions upon the environment, the impacts of degrading environmental conditions upon their inhabitants and the abstraction of human actions from the consequences they may have. In turn, these concerns call up questions about the alienation of humans from their environments, and the loss of traditional ways of life and association with particular environments. Concurrently, they also open up the 7 possibilities of re-establishing connections with the natural world and re-addressing the ways that these connections are understood. The environmental concerns which interest the examples of contemporary British writing discussed in this study are made manifest through the relationships of the pastoral. As I have explained above, the pastoral is concerned with the interfaces between conceptions of the human and the natural, of people relative to place