Pastoral Criticism in the Context of the Environmental Humanities - Trajectories in the Anthology Georgian Poetry Vol. I-V (1911-1922)

Since the dawn of ecocriticism, the pastoral has become a relevant case study for investigating the relationship between humans and nonhumans. While the environmental implications embedded in the pastoral are now well-established (Buell 1995; Hiltner 2013; Gifford 1999), discussions on this topic (still) rely on a traditional anthropocentric framework and on rooted dichotomies including country/city, human/nature, and nature/culture. As posthuman studies has discussed, binary thinking and dialectic oppositions appear as limited approaches for adequately exploring environmentally related issues. Moreover, considering the necessity of reconfiguring traditional assumptions of Western thought – and as a way to better respond to challenges posed by the Anthropocene – increasing attention has been placed on the idea of rereading the archives of Western literature (Zapf, 2020) through a more attentive ecocritical lens. Since the pastoral possesses a pivotal role in this sense – even though it is often an object of neglect and of critical devaluation – my study focuses on the following question: how does current (scholarly) ecological awareness affect the reading of (traditional) pastoral poetry? With these aspects in mind, my project aims to re-conceptualize the pastoral by proposing a post-dualistic, post-anthropocentric (Braidotti 2019; Ferrando 2019) understanding of it as a tool for re-evaluating disregarded pastoral poems. Attention is placed on negotiating the pastoral traditional domains, for re-discussing the concept as depicting a peculiar literary ecosystem, which is useful for investigating issues of human-nonhuman connectedness in pastoral poems. This perspective leads to the idea of reframing traditional pastoral criticism into a form of ‘sustainable’ criticism, inspired by the ecological 5Rs model: Reuse, Reduce, Recycle, Repair, and Rot. This standpoint wishes to disclose latent trajectories from disregarded past pastoral poems, which today may become useful for informing current readership about ethical models of human-nonhuman relationship. Hence, my dissertation offers a re-reading of selected pastoral poems pertaining to the five-volume anthology Georgian Poetry Vol. I-V, published between 1912 and 1922. As a way for re-evaluating an overlooked and dismissed literary case in English literature, this operation: a) reinscribes the collection within the rising (proto)environmental discourse in early twentieth-century England; b) discusses the importance of resurrecting this anthology in light of the challenges of today’s ecological crises; c) re-evaluates the pastoral in it, passing from seeing it as a ‘literary stigma’ to a baseline for a critical re(dis)covery an underrated literary work.