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5 History and the anti-pastoral: Utopian dreams and rituals of purification in the ‘American Trilogy’ And then the loss of the daughter [. . .] blasting to smithereens his particular form of utopian thinking, the plague America infiltrating the Swede’s castle and there infecting everyone . . . transport[ing] him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into [. . .] the counterpastoral – into the indigenous American berserk. (Roth 1997: 85–6) ‘Ira called his utopian dream Communism, Eve called hers Sylphid. The parent’s utopia of the perfect child, the actress
This is a comprehensive and definitive study of the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson. It offers lucid, detailed and nuanced readings of each of Jacobson’s novels, and makes a powerful case for the importance of his work in the landscape of contemporary fiction. Focusing on the themes of comedy, masculinity and Jewishness, the book emphasises the richness and diversity of Jacobson’s work. Often described by others as ‘the English Philip Roth’ and by himself as ‘the Jewish Jane Austen’, Jacobson emerges here as a complex and often contradictory figure: a fearless novelist; a combative public intellectual; a polemical journalist; an unapologetic elitist and an irreverent outsider; an exuberant iconoclast and a sombre satirist. Never afraid of controversy, Jacobson tends to polarise readers; but, love him or hate him, he is difficult to ignore. This book gives him the thorough consideration and the balanced evaluation that he deserves.
whole cycle, but always going for that final invigoration of comedy’ ( 2012a : 270). The comic novels that I will look at in the rest of this chapter run the gamut from light-hearted sexual farce to acerbic political satire, but they do share what Jacobson calls, in another paradoxical formulation, ‘the high indignity of comic narrative’ ( Jacobson 2016c : 48), an anti-pastoral sensibility and a preoccupation with literary politics. Coming From Behind ( 1983 ) The 1984 Black Swan paperback edition of Jacobson’s first novel gives the distinct impression that it is
outside the white gaze, not against it’, so Harriet Wilson does not write against pastoral conventions in the way an anti-pastoral does,7 but stands outside the pastoral’s ‘gaze’ – without it (in both senses of the word). Her 66 R.J. Ellis novel offers a close engagement with power and economics in the New England countryside, illuminating from without the way the pastoral preserves a near-silence on both sides of the Atlantic concerning farm labour’s exhausting physical demands (though this illumination stayed unrecognised for over 120 years, whilst the novel
5 Replying to Raleigh’s ‘The Nymph’s Reply’: Allusion, anti-pastoral, and four centuries of pastoral invitations Hannibal Hamlin In 1653 Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Passionate Shepherd to his Love’ and Sir Walter Raleigh’s ‘Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd’ were printed, certainly not for the first time, but in what have become their standard versions – six stanzas of four lines in iambic tetrametre couplets – in Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler.1 This was the first time ‘The Nymph’s Reply’ was attributed to Raleigh, an attribution which has been generally accepted
‘pastoral’/ ‘anti-pastoral’ writers expect that their work might be read by all who can read the language in which they write. It’s the paranoia of the poet that far fewer people will ever read a poem than might be hoped for. Can contemporary pastoral poems speak to rural workers, to farmers, to those who make the pesticides? Maybe; maybe not. It depends on intent and reception. Does audience define pastoral? Do the educated Greeks enjoying Theocritus, or the Romans reading Virgil, constitute the idea of pastoral audience? A poet like the rustic John Clare, who might be
a more general exploration of sexual politics, and in conjunction with the spectre of mortality. The Very Model of a Man ( 1992 ) The Very Model of a Man is a pivotal book in Jacobson’s career. It straddles what might be thought of as the first two phases of Jacobson’s career, both chronologically (it was published six years after his previous novel, Redback , and six years before his next, No More Mr Nice Guy ) and formally (it can be read both as the culmination of his exploration of anti-pastoral comedy and as the start of his mid-career investment in
my previous book, Post-War Jewish Fiction (2001), exploring Roth’s use of what I call the ‘anti-pastoral’ mode in his ‘American Trilogy’ of novels. Whereas in earlier work, I looked at the anti-pastoral primarily in terms of ‘nature anxiety’, here I apply the term in a more metaphorical sense to define Roth’s deconstruction of the Utopian dreams and rituals of purification with which many of the characters in American Pastoral (1997), I Married A Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000) delude themselves and deceive others. In the last chapter I look at The Plot
Gifford this is sound anti-pastoralism, but this was Hughes's record of coming to terms with what is involved in pastoral agriculture. Since sheep were first domesticated, shepherds have been faced with such dilemmas. Difficult births are more likely when ewes have enough to eat. Research on Hirta, discussed in Chapter 2 , has shown that February in the wild would have been the time when ewes were starving and their lambs would be born underweight and not likely to survive. If this ewe had been wild, with Hughes as an observer, both ewe and lamb would have died, but
unreal, far-off atmosphere when the Greek words occur in the context of Latin verse)…4 Lock argues, ‘Pastoral and counter-pastoral are hardly to be told apart. Like utopia and dystopia, the pairing is not antithetical but, rather, bifocal: a question of blinking, a second glance’,5 and in essence, he is correct. An anti-pastoral might self-determine, but by definition requires an idyll to argue against. But really, what many eco-poets are wittingly or unwittingly doing is attempting to de-pastoralise discourse on the natural world by repositioning their creative and