What Else Is Pastoral?: Renaissance Literature and the Environment

Ken Hiltner

Published by Cornell University Press 2011

What Else Is Pastoral?

Renaissance Literature and the Environment

Ken Hiltner

https://doi.org/10.7591/9780801460760

Overview
Contents

About this book

A corrective to the prevailing interpretation of pastoral poetry that shows the value of reading literature ecologically.

Author / Editor information

Ken Hiltner is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Milton and Ecology and the editor of Renaissance Ecology: Imagining Eden in Milton's England.

Reviews

Robert N. Watson, Distinguished Professor of English, UCLA:

I read What Else Is Pastoral? with interest, respect, and pleasure. Intelligent and well informed, it is a valuable contribution to a rapidly emerging area of cultural studies. Ken Hiltner looks hard at literature and history and produces thereby some fresh perspectives on literary texts and environmental history alike.

John P. Rumrich, Arthur J. Thaman and Wilhelmina Doré Thaman Professor of English, The University of Texas at Austin:

What Else Is Pastoral?, notable for its theoretical sophistication and breadth of reference, is worthwhile precisely because it is humble enough to take representations of the countryside as actually being about the countryside first. Yes, these representations occur in cultural discourses with political implications, but the implications are grounded, literally, in concerns of the earth. Ken Hiltner reads pastoral as about humankind's relationship to the natural world. In What Else Is Pastoral?, he establishes a versatile theoretical basis from which to address Renaissance nature writing and ends with case studies that convincingly establish a payoff.

What is fascinating about What Else is Pastoral? is the way it tracks the gestation of one of the most pressing issues: how do we represent those processes and activities that our society can live neither with nor without? Hiltner challenges environmentally minded critics who focus on 'wilderness and nature' without accounting for the 'dynamic whereby we become conscious of the countryside and the earth.'... Hiltner's book does not overplay the relevance to contemporary ecological issues. Even so, the analogues are compelling, especially when he takes us over to Ireland to investigate the centrality of land to a postcolonial perspective.

Lowell Duckert:

This book is a fresh departure from the long critical tradition that reads the pastoral figuratively or as a stock convention. For Hiltner, the pastoral in Renaissance England is... a form of nature writing... [and] reflects real environmental crises in and around London, fraught issues that sparked debates and influenced literature across different forms and genres.... Hiltner has made a valuable contribution to both early modern studies and ecocriticism.

Terry Gifford:

For Hiltner a preoccupation with mimesis as the defining element of nature writing has blinded ecocritics to 'what else is pastoral in the Renaissance.' Chapters on ‘Air Pollution in Early Modern London’ and ‘Environmental Protest Literature of the Renaissance’ lead to ‘Empire, the Environment, and the Growth of the Georgic’. The latter, in particular, is typical of the radical rethinking demanded by... [this] challenging extension of ecocritical achievement.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part I. Literary Issues
1. The Nature of Art Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
2. What Else Is Pastoral? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	34
3. What Else Was Pastoral in the Renaissance? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	49
4. Pastoral and Ideology, and the Environment Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	67
Part II. Environmental Problems
5. Representing Air Pollution in Early Modern London Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	95
6. Environmental Protest Literature of the Renaissance Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	125
7. Empire, the Environment, and the Growth of Georgic Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	156
Select Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	175
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	187

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 200
Keywords: Environmental History; Literary Studies; Medieval & Renaissance Studies

eBook

Published: March 18, 2011
ISBN: 9780801460760