In this thesis I have made a study of certain aspects of pastoralism and the pastoral genre in late Elizabethan literature. I have done this because I felt that Elizabethan pastoral writing was, at its best, far more than just a literary exercise undertaken, as was much Continental pastoral writing, to furnish the vernacular with a genre approved by Classical precedent. The strength of Elizabethan pastoral derived from the combination of certain indigenous factors present during Elizabeth's reign, with the current interest in imitating the Classics and introducing a famous genre into the vernacular. There had always been in English literature a strong response to the natural world and this response revealed itself in pastoral writing in which the traditional naturalistic details derived from Classical sources were infused with the grace and strength of direct observation. More importantly, Elizabethan England had a monarch who was not only ideally suited through her sex and celibacy to play the leading role in a pastoral world, but who also actively encouraged and enjoyed the eulogistic sentiments native to the Renaissance pastoral. In the English attempt to imitate a favourite Renaissance version of the pastoral - the use of a pastoral framework to comment on ecclesiastical or political affairs - there was, in Tudor Protestantism, with all its internal conflicts and its vital struggle against the political and spiritual forces of the Roman church, an ideal source of material for eclogues in the style of Mantuan. Such factors ensured that Elizabethan pastoral had a significance and relevance largely lacking in the more academic products of Continental pastoralists. Preface, p. i

This thesis examines the use of the pastoral form in recent Canadian literature. As the pastoral constitutes a literary site where a concern for landscape converges with a search for community, it has been employed as a myth in nationalist discourses whose functioning depend heavily on symbolized landscapes and idealized social types. The philosophical basis of the pastoral is the classical opposition between nature and culture. For this reason, its representations are often coded as 'natural'. To this extent, the pastoral participates in a hegemonic myth-making system, constituting a limited semiotic field in which certain representations are privileged while others are negated. Following Marx and Barthes, the thesis contends that an attack the nature/culture opposition is essential to undermining the hegemony of the myth-making process. In the context of nationalism, a pastoral can articulate a critique of dominant a 'naturalized' representations when it questions its own use of the nature/culture opposition.

Dans Arcadia de Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), les représentations de la nature témoignent de la richesse de l’univers artistique de l’auteur. Le titre de l’œuvre suggère que le socle esthétique sur lequel repose la mimesis sidnéienne est ancré dans l’imitation de la tradition poétique pastorale. L’imitation littéraire est certes au cœur du processus de création sur lequel repose la composition de l’œuvre. Cependant, le texte de Sidney est bien plus qu’une autre Arcadie littéraire inspirée des Bucoliques de Virgile ou de L’Arcadie de Jacopo Sannazaro. Le texte fait s’imbriquer les récits héroïques qui empruntent à l’épopée les repères esthétiques sur lesquels reposent l’évocation du locus terribilis, vision antagoniste du locus amoenus. L’œuvre est donc animée par une passion pour la fiction au point que la littérature et la lecture se substituent à l’intrigue en tant que sujet même de l’œuvre. Cette conception de la création littéraire comme acte réflexif imprègne la représentation de la nature qui devient donc dans certains passages un texte dans le texte, une nature textualisée. Le champ de la réflexivité s’étend à d’autres domaines de la création artistique et notamment aux arts plastiques dont l’esthétique informe à la fois la représentation de la nature et la matière verbale de l’œuvre. L’affinité entre les formes verbales et les formes visuelles est sous-tendue par une esthétique commune que l’on doit replacer dans le contexte du mouvement du maniérisme. Paradoxalement, l’unité de cette œuvre protéiforme réside dans sa fragmentation dont résulte une esthétique du détail. L’énergie créative de l’auteur s’illustre en effet dans la représentation de petites natures dont l’esthétique témoigne de la beauté de son univers artistique. / In Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, the representations of nature testify to the diversity and wealth of the author’s artistic world. The title of the literary work suggests that the aesthetic foundations on which the Sidneyan mimesis lies are rooted in the imitation of the pastoral poetic tradition. Literary imitation lies at the core of the creative process from which the text proceeds. Yet, Philip Sidney’s work goes beyond the vision of nature as locus amoenus associated with Virgil’s Bucolics or Jacopo Sannazaro’s own Arcadia. The text features embedded narratives recounting heroic tales which draw on the epic literary tradition and lead to the representation of nature as locus terribilis. The passion for fiction with which Arcadia is imbued leads to a shift from the plot to the essence of literature as the main focus of Sidney’s work. This conception of literary creation as a reflexive praxis pervades the representation of nature which, in parts of the text, becomes a text within the text, a textualized nature. The spectrum of the reflexive dynamics encompasses several artistic areas including the plastic arts which inform both the aesthetics of the representation of nature and that of the verbal matter. The correspondences between the visual forms and the verbal ones spring from a common aesthetics which ties to the artistic context of mannerism. Paradoxically, the unity of this multifarious work lies in its fragmented dimension from which derives an aesthetics of the detail. Indeed, the illustration of author’s creative energy resides in the depictions of a small-scale nature and minute details which illustrate the beauty of his artistic environment.

“The Pastoral Field: Local Ecologies in Early Modern Literature” excavates the ways in which pastoral literature registers the role nature-human interaction played in shaping protracted struggles over land use and ownership, and in the degradation and improvement of natural landscapes. Revising a longstanding critical tradition that understands early modern pastoral as primarily allegorical, the project instead insists that the form can also accommodate topical thinking about regional ecologies. Shifting the emphasis away from the Elizabethan court towards local agricultural politics, it unearths the ways in which natural crises such as flooding, famine, sheep rot, and soil degradation hastened processes of agricultural improvement and enclosure—and how those processes were in turn mediated, counter-factually imagined, and actively promoted within the literary devices of pastoral. Each of my four chapters locates pastoral plays, poems, romances, and country-house entertainments in the particular landscapes that shaped their development— landscapes that were, in turn, reconfigured by the literary and political concerns of Elizabethan authors.

No description available.