Pastoral

Half Unit proposal

1. Pastoral Conventions I: Theocritus and Vergil
2. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheard’s Calendar (1579)
3. Shakespeare, As You Like It (1603)
4. Crabbe's The Village (1783)
5. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1789)
6. Beethoven, Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68 (1808)
7. George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859)
8. J R R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1951-53)
9. Ted Hughes, Moortown Diary (1979)
10. Contemporary Environmentalism

Full Unit proposal

1. Pastoral Conventions: Theocritus and Vergil
2. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheard’s Calendar (1579)
3. Shakespeare, As You Like It (1603)
4. Poussin Et In Arcadio Ego (1636)
5. Crabbe's The Village (1783)
6. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1789)
7. Beethoven, Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68 (1808)
8. George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859)
9. Matthew Arnold, ‘Thyrsis’ (1867)
10. Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)
11. William Morris, News From Nowhere (1890)
12. J R R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1951-53)
13. The Brotherhood of Ruralists (1975-present)
14. Ted Hughes, Moortown Diary (1979)
15. Environmentalism: 21st Century Pastoral

The two books that have had the greatest impact on my own thinking about Pastoral as a mode (and which, therefore, have the biggest influence on this course) are:

William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935). On this book, see Pamela McCallum, 'Figural Narrative and Plot Construction: Empson on Pastoral' in Christopher Norris, William Empson: the Critical Achievement (CUP 1993), 196-212

Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (OUP 1975). On this book, see: 'The Country and the City: Hidden and Knowable Communities', in J. E. T. Eldridge, Elizabeth Eldridge, Lizzie Eldridge (eds), Raymond Williams: Making Connections (Routledge 1994)


There are a great many other books and articles about 'pastoral', of course, which you might also want to look at:

Paul Alpers, What Is Pastoral? (University of Chicago Press, 1997)

Terry Gifford, Pastoral (Routledge New Critical Idiom 1999)

Judith Haber, Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction: Theocritus to Marvell (Cambridge University Press, 1994)

David James and Philip Tew (eds), New Versions of Pastoral: Post-romantic, Modern, and Contemporary Responses to the Tradition (Associated University Presses 2009)

Gerald M. MacLean, Donna Landry and Joseph P. Ward (eds), The Country and the City Revisited: England and the politics of culture, 1550-1850 (Cambridge Univ. Press 1999)

Annabel M. Patterson, Pastoral and ideology: Virgil to Valéry (University of California Press 1987)

Mathilde Skoie and Sonia Bjørnstad-Velázquez (eds), Pastoral and the humanities: Arcadia re-inscribed (Bristol Phoenix Press 2006)

Susan Snyder, Pastoral process: Spenser, Marvell, Milton (Stanford University Press, 1998)