New Versions of Pastoral

Book excerpt: Bringing together both established and emerging scholars of the long nineteenth century, literary modernism, landscape and hemispheric studies, and contemporary fiction, New Versions of Pastoral offers a historically wide-ranging account of the Bucolic tradition, tracing the formal diversity of pastoral writing up to the present day. Dividing its analytic focus between periods, the volume contextualizes a wide range of exemplary practitioners, genres, and movements: contributors attend to early modernism's vacillation between critiquing and aestheticizing the rise of primitivist nostalgia; the ambiguous mythologization of the English estate by the twentieth-century manor house novel; and the post-national revisiting of the countryside and its sovereign status in contemporary imaginings of regional life.