Shepherds After Nature : Rural Pasts and Futures in Pastoral Literature

Details

Supervisors

De Bruyn, Ben

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [60] en langues et lettres modernes, orientation générale

Abstract

The work investigates the pastoral past of Great Britain through literature. In order to interrogate the literary perspective on Britain's rural past as well as its future, we address pastoral nostalgia in literature to see how it develops in the late nineteenth century in books such as Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd and W.H. Hudson's A Shepherd's Life, and continues today in the genre of new nature writing with books such as Isabella Tree's Wilding and Philip Walling's Counting Sheep. It provides a better understanding of how pastoral nostalgia develops and how it influences representations of the countryside in the imagination of Great Britain. Finally, it allows us to formulate elements of solutions to go beyond this nostalgia in a pastoral rediscovery.