Chapter 2 contests deeply entrenched assumptions about pastoral, arguing that the Eclogues do not evince nostalgia for a lost, idealized nature but nonetheless are deeply concerned with the nonhuman environment. The chapter shows that the local places so central to the Eclogues are networks and assemblages of human and nonhuman beings, and that the local dwelling valorized by the collection is dwelling as a part of a more-than-human community. The poetry figures this ecological dwelling through the trope of pastoral sympathy and through its focus on environmental sound. Ultimately, the chapter argues that Vergilian pastoral is best understood not as a representation of herdsmen’s songs but of entire bucolic soundscapes. The second part of the chapter considers the implications of this more-than-human acoustic world for our understanding of Vergil’s own poetry. It argues that nonhuman sound contributes to the sonic texture of Vergil’s language, identifying an acoustic ecopoetics in the Eclogues as Vergil manipulates his language to transmit and recreate nonhuman sound.

Chapter 1 examines how locality matters to the Eclogues, and how the poetry collection conceptualizes and constructs local place. In Eclogues 1 and 9, Vergil stresses the importance of local dwelling, representing multifaceted place attachments between individuals and their familiar homes. At the same time, in dramatizing the effects of land confiscations, Vergil probes the highly contingent nature of place, defined by unstable boundaries and through power relations. In addition to providing new readings of these particular poems, this chapter lays the foundation for the rest of the book by exploring the concept of local place and showing how a multifaceted examination of place making and place attachment offers a more nuanced and fuller reading than a focus on landscape, nature, or an opposition between town and country. The chapter then turns to an apparent problem with this place-based reading of the Eclogues: the poems’ ambiguous settings. Drawing on Theocritus and Cicero, it shows that the Eclogues are interested in the many intersections and cross-fertilizations between actual and fictional places. The poems construct local places, even if they cannot be located.

The antiquarian interests of Propertius 4 introduce a series of vignettes of early Rome (elegies 4.1, 4.4, 4.9, 4.10), and several further poems include rustic or quasi-rustic loca amoena in less likely contexts (a marine locale in 4.6, an urban park in 4.8). This chapter investigates how these passages engage elegy in an encounter with the genre of pastoral as codified in Virgil’s Eclogues, expanded in the Georgics and inserted in the antiquarian Aeneid. The politics of this encounter are urgent, pastoral being a vehicle of the Augustan ‘Golden Age’, but also inherently evanescent and ‘elegiac’. No less urgent are its poetics, pastoral being a lowly erotic genre like elegy, but also capable of cosmic and epic flights (as in Eclogue 6, notwithstanding its recusatio of epic themes – a tension closely tracked in elegy 4.6 on Actium). This ‘upward mobility’ is another respect in which pastoral is, arguably, analogous to elegy in its late-Propertian phase (if not earlier in the lost work of Gallus, an ‘absent presence’ here). Propertius’ recurrent loca amoena (which are not as idyllic as their name suggests) are thus spaces of generic negotiation in which ideology is never far away.

The ninth chapter finishes what was started in the fourth, covering personal poetry of the Augustan period. It begins with Vergil’s Eclogues, first explaining why.The majority of the chapter focuses on the varied works of Horace, his long career, and his relationship with power. It ends with Ovid’s exile poetry, which is the last literature of the republic.

Pastoral as Goldsmith’s model has been overlooked because literary historians still commonly assume that the last notable pastorals were published by Pope in 1709, and that pastoral poetry thereafter declined, or was turned into a mock form by Gay and Swift. In retrospect we see that the old genre system was breaking down, that some traditional genres (e.g., Georgic) were rising in importance and others declining, that new genres and subgenres and mixed forms were appearing. But that was not clear in 1750, when Goldsmith began his literary career and was looking about for models. This chapter surveys the models upon which Goldsmith drew and proposes that, in The Deserted Village, Goldsmith returns to Virgil and to the roots of English pastoral.

I loathe everything to do with The People,’ writes Callimachus, and this (public) turning away from the public poetry of the fifth century is a stance, a gesture, repeated in a multiformity of guises throughout the texts of the Hellenistic period. Although the practices of literary production, performance and circulation are known in even less detail for this period than for the fifth century (and many questions about, say, the constitution of the public of Hellenistic literature are simply not answerable with any security), none the less there are much-discussed and highly significant shifts both in the conditions of literary production and in the presentation of the poet’s voice which require some brief introductory remarks.

The chapter attends to Les Murray’s fusion of ancient and modern frameworks, forms and, subject matter. It provides an analysis of “The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Cycle” in light of his desire to draw together the three strands he viewed as shaping Australian culture: Aboriginal, rural, and urban. The chapter also discusses Murray’s formal inventiveness and comic playfulness with language, and his interest in the relationship between poetry and the divine. The chapter reads Murray’s self-definition as an outsider in light of his valuing of a pastoral-georgic tradition and a focus on subjects and settings beyond the metropolitan. The chapter argues that while Murray engaged with the vernacular and was anti-modernist in outlook, his style is, nevertheless, sophisticated and neo-modernist in its technical innovation.

This chapter traces the development of Judith Wright’s poetics, outlining her early focus on specific places and their legacies rather than on ideas of nation. It offers close readings of poems like “South of My Days,” “Bullocky,” and “Bora Ring.” The chapter then identifies mid-career attention to interpersonal relations before considering Wright’s growing awareness of settler-colonial privilege, Aboriginal sovereignty, different orders of temporality, and a continued expression of love for the land. The chapter reflects on the impact of Wright’s friendship with Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal and analyses “Two Dreamtimes.” It also examines Wright’s decision in 1990 to forego writing poetry in order to embrace environmental activism.

This chapter examines the relationship between Vaughan Williams’s music and ideas of landscape. Although images of landscape and nature have often figured prominently in the reception of Vaughan Williams’s work, closer attention to their historical context reveals that they were highly contested and contingent terms. Vaughan Williams’s preoccupation with landscape hence emerges as a highly productive creative tension throughout his composition output, from his early orchestral tone poems to his final symphony.

This chapter focuses on musical interpretations of Giambattista Marino’s (1569–1625) pastoral poetry in Monteverdi’s Sixth Book of madrigals from 1614. The pastoral mode gave Monteverdi licence to create imaginary worlds of musical shepherds and nymphs, just as it had given Marino the opportunity to create a web of poetic references reaching back to antiquity. The formal and stylistic experiments found in the pastoral madrigals, or the rime boscherecce, provided Monteverdi fertile ground from which to use musical materials in a similar way. The affinities and, in many cases, the incongruities between the pastoral images and characters in the texts and Monteverdi’s manipulation of them in music created a new kind of listening experience for the audience. It invited them to delight in the unexpected.

This chapter explores the recurring mourning and funereal rites – affectively charged moments of remembrance – in Shakespeare’s late romance Cymbeline. Focusing on the subplot in which Belarius, an exiled courtier, has abducted the king’s two sons and raised them as noble savages in the wilds of Wales, this chapter argues that these scenes invite a vision of ancient British primitive indigeneity precisely in order to transcend it. The princes’ obsequies for relatives and friends give voice to their own utter lack of familial and historical memory, thus echoing both antiquarian portrayals of the ancient British and colonial portrayals of natives in the Americas and Ireland as memoryless peoples. Engaging politically and ecologically oriented work in affect studies, I interpret the rustic princes’ mourning as a national and even imperial emotion that can illuminate how, and why, Shakespeare and his contemporaries imagined ancient forebears as oblivious “primitives.” By ultimately staging an “improvement” from an ahistorical condition of homegrown indigeneity, it is argued, the play translates British savagery into a civilized condition suitable for English colonization, which was then gathering speed in Virginia and Ulster.

Chapter 2 treats the early Italianate-poetry that Cervantes wrote for Isabel de Valois (1567, 1568) when he was around twenty years old as serious works composed within the particular cultural and poetic practices of the Habsburg court. In his first sonnet, Cervantes’ speaker develops a conceptual play between the speaking ingenio and the lofty lady through the use of an exalted apostrophe, a key feature of Pastoral Petrarchism that would inflect the subsequent decades of the author’s literary career. The only known copy of this sonnet was preserved in an early seventeenth-century manuscript collection of pastoral and erotic lyric and narrative poetry pertaining to the Habsburg court, now housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Richelieu. This chapter examines and draws upon the manuscript in order to reconstruct the literary environment in which Cervantes wrote, as it was understood by the early modern compiler (a primary source on readership, reception, and genre). Ms. Espagnole 373 also recontextualizes the poetry that Cervantes composed the following year for the untimely death of Isabel on October 3, 1568. This chapter considers Cervantes’ relationship to Giulio Acquaviva while the papal legate was present in the Habsburg court, his journey to Rome, and the Sigura affair.

Chapter 1 recovers the pastoral precedents for the culture that directly precipitated Cervantes’ first poems within the court of Isabel de Valois (Queen of Spain, 1560–1568), in which literary art forms and forms of cultural practice became intertwined in complex mimetic processes. From Theocritus, Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Poliziano, and Sannazaro to Garcilaso de la Vega, Juan Boscán, and Jorge de Montemayor, the retreat of the pastoral was understood to be a device employed to encode and allegorize the private life and lived experience of the court which made poiesis possible. Drawing on archival records (relaciones) of life in the court, the diary kept by one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting, and histories of Isabel’s reign, Chapter 1 explores the frequent and often improvisational imitation of various literary genres, including the romance of chivalry, by members of the court caught up in erotic entanglements which became the content of pastoral fiction. At the confluence of literary allegory and contemporary history, through the exchange of motes in the terrero, the palace became pastoral.

Chapter 3 explores how an exemplary amorous biography, a type of vita poetica or literary hagiography, was attributed to el divino Francesco Petrarch over the course of the sixteenth century. Imitatio applied not only to the figures and tropes of the Trionfi and Canzoniere, but also to the figura of the poet as a model or exemplar for the life of an author. After roughly two centuries (1374–1575), Petrarch’s lasting fame became literary immortality like that of ancient authors (Homer and Vergil). From the 1535 alleged rediscovery of Laura’s grave and Alessandro Piccolomini’s 1540 pilgrimage to Petrarch’s tomb, to the various sixteenth-century translations of Petrarch’s poetry, and commentaries made by lyric poets in the front matter to publications, in manuscript poems, and in pastoral fiction, the literary afterlife of the figura of the poet took shape. This chapter reconstructs the figura of the poet as it was imagined, articulated, imitated, and reinvented by sixteenth-century poets writing in Castilian. By the middle of the sixteenth century the Castilianized ingenio (ingenium) had come to define the figura of the poet. This chapter fills in a lacuna (Garcilaso to Góngora) of roughly sixty years which is crucial to Cervantes’ work and studies of early modern poetics.

Chapter 6 examines the force of lyric subjectivity as narrative emplotment in the Galatea. At the confluence of verse and prose, allegory and history, mimesis and poiesis, this chapter treats the Galatea and contemporary works, beginning with the 1582 transition from verse to prose in Pedro de Padilla’s Églogas pastoriles (Seville). While the Galatea has often been dismissed in scholarship as a partially formed and immature work, or reinterpreted through standard approaches to the DQ, this chapter studies the chronotopic dynamism of Cervantes’ first prose fiction through the narrative emplotment of Lauso’s lyric interior. It is attuned to the sophisticated narrative architecture of an unprecedented capacity to juggle multiple lyric temporalities within a single narrative landscape. The Galatea lent novelistic immediacy to the timeless retreat of the pastoral through the use of lyric subjectivity. As a meditation on the nature of love and lyric subjectivity inherent in Pastoral Petrarchism, in the Galatea the figura of the poet as literary character was fully developed in Lauso. As a novel in key, the Galatea not only pertained to the fábulas of Cervantes’ literary milieu, it also wove a tapestry of narrativized lyric intersubjectivity necessary to the conception of the first modern novel.

Chapter 5 reconstructs the site of production for Cervantes’ prosimetric pastoral, the Galatea (1585), and investigates the way in which he disguised himself and members of his own literary milieu as shepherd-poets under pastoral pseudonyms. It employs paratextual sources to reconstruct this milieu. Drawing on early manuscript annotations (ms.2.856, Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid) that identify Cervantes as the “Lauso” of the Galatea and earlier scholarship on the Galatea as roman à clef, this chapter proposes an additional decoding of the work through attention to the use of biographical names (and pseudonyms) for poets associated with the river Tajo in the “Canto de Calíope” (Book VI of the Galatea). With the decline of literary circles in the courts, poetic life migrated from the Alcázar to the barrio de las letras. The established poets of Isabel’s reign – Figueroa, Laínez, Gálvez de Montalvo, Gómez de Tapia, and Cervantes – were joined by younger poets – López Maldonado, Pedro de Padilla, Vargas Manrique, Liñán de Riaza, Juan Rufo Gutiérrez, Lope de Vega, Luis de Góngora – to form a milieu of “urban pastoralists.” The encomiastic poetry that Cervantes wrote indicates a network of authors contemporary to the Galatea, in which the figura of the poet became a literary character.

This chapter chronicles the development of the short story as a product of the Program Era from its inception in the 1930s up through the contemporary moment, and argues that its history can be understood in terms of the experiences of the college-educated creative class, whose socioeconomic situation is perennially precarious. As shown through illustrations from the Best American Short Stories, two institutions loom large in this history: the New Yorker and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which can stand in for the NYC vs. MFA dialectic that shapes the careers of most American short story writers. It is between these poles that the short story has been negotiated and evaluated during the Program Era. For most writers, it is an apprenticeship form, originally addressed to teachers and students and then to other writers and literary professionals, preparing the field for the novel addressed to the larger reading public.