1. Pastoral Literature and Nature University of Helsinki/
Comparative Literature
M.A. Pekka Raittinen

2. Thomas Cole The Course of an Empire
Thomas Cole The Course of an Empire. The Arcadian or Pastoral State 1836
First was the Golden Age. Then rectitude spontaneous in the heart prevailed, and faith. Avengers were not seen, for laws unframed were all unknown and needless. Punishment and fear of penalties existed not.
Ovid, Metamorphoses

3. Joachim Wtewael The Golden Age 1605
Now the last age by Cumae's Sibyl sung Has come and gone, and the majestic roll Of circling centuries begins anew: Justice returns, returns old Saturn's reign, With a new breed of men sent down from heaven. Only do thou, at the boy's birth in whom The iron shall cease, the golden race arise,
Virgil , Bucolics, Eclogue IV

4. The pastoral state or the Golden Age
In every culture there is a myth of a Golden Age; no work; no organized state, no laws etc.
Hesiod Works and Days; The five ages of mankind; The Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age; Heroic Age and present Iron Age
Cyclical view of history => Golden Age will return ( later in Vico, Joyce etc)
Ruled by Cronus (Greek) and Saturn (Roman)
Siirtymä paimentolaisuudesta maanviljelykseen.

5. Pastoral poetry of Antiquity
Bucolic poetry; Greek βουκολικόν, from βουκόλος => ”cowherd”; shepherd
Theocritus (3rd century BC.) Idylls; => bucolics, mimes, epics, epigrams
”Idyll”= ”a small picture”; eidos ”small poem
Singing matches between the shepherds
The dichotomies country versus city; past versus present already developed by Theocritus

6. Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) Eclogues (or Bucolics)
70 – 19 BC. Lived in turbulant Augustan period of Roman history
Civil war and land campaign of the Octavian era => Virgil’s idyll is already an idyll in peril
In Eclogues the trope of Arcadia used for the first time
The fourth Eclogue is a prophesy about the birth of a boy child and the return of the Golden Age
(Virgil’s other works; Georgics and Aeneid)

7. Later developments The Renaissance Italy; Boccaccio, Petrarch etc.
The English tradition: Sir Philip Sidney Arcadia, Edmund Spencer The Faerie Queen and Shepheardes Calendar; Alexander Pope Pastorals etc
The sub-genre of pastoral elegy; developed from Theocritus => mourning the death of a friend; John Milton Lycidas; Shelley Adonais

8. Pastoral theory
In Virgils work; pastoral is already an (somewhat) artificial discourse; own tropes and conventions
Friedrich Schiller: On Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1795)
Frank Kermode, English Pastoral Poetry (1952) => A form of urban nostalgia
Raymond Williams: An idealized version of country life in English modern literature => Class conflict dissimulated

9. Terry Gifford (1999); three definitions;
1). A form, a genre of literature
2). A looser term for describing literature depicting the countryside
3). A pejorative term for idealized and simplified depiction of the countryside

10. Acccording to Greg Garrard (2004) can be:
1). Elegic; looking backwards
2). Idyll; the abundant present
3). Utopia; obtained in the future

11. American pastoral?

12. Leo Marx: The Machine in the Garden (1964)
Thomas Jefferson; America as an agrarian utopia
The Shepherd and new a green world
Thoreau ”rapt in a revery” awakens to the sound of steam engine
For Marx ”a middle ground” that combines civilization and wilderness – best of both worlds

13. Problems?
Ecocritics have been suspicious of pastoral as an idealization of countryside
A (post)modern pastoral; ideal of a garden city / green suburbia => ”back to the nature”; while at the same time ”requiring fantastic amounts of high-technology upkeep” (Wilson 1992)
“ […] a predominantly private landscape controlled by the power and exclusivity of property ownership.” (Bunce 1994

14. A Finnish Pastoral?

15. Werner Holmberg: Ideal Landscape, 1860
So-called panoramic motive in Finnish literature, beginning with the national poet Johan Ludvig Runeberg
Runeberg’s hexameterer epic Hanna (1836)
Historian Matti Klinge: ”Idylli ja uhka” (=> ”Idyll in peril”)
In Finnish culture the dichotomy of city and countryside is much less important than in the United States or England
Väitteitä: pastoraali aina jossakin määrin ”poliittinen”, ideologinen kirjallisuuden muoto?

16. ”No shepherd, no pastoral”
- Leo Marx