Abstract: “The Lie of the Village: Economies of the Pastoral in and before the Romantic Era”
At first glance, the pastoral seems to represent almost the direct opposite of the marketplace. In its classical conception – primarily shaped by Hesiod, Theocritus and Virgil – it envisions a locus amoenus where humans are living in harmony with, and self-sufficiently off, nature, free to indulge in poetic and romantic pursuits with not a (financial) care in the world. If there is competition, it is of an artistic kind; if there is consumption, it is of carnal pleasures. The acknowledgement that such idyllic pastoral fantasies rarely stand the test of reality has been implicit, and creatively deployed, in the genre tradition from the very start – famously, for instance, in Raleigh’s nymph’s deconstructive response to the impositions of Marlowe’s wooing shepherd.
In the paper I propose I will try to show how negotiations and re-conceptions of the pastoral in the second half of the 18thcentury prepare the ground for – what the CfP for this conference describes as – “the irretrievable splitting apart of previously cohering conceptions of value” around the turn of the 19th century. My main focus point will be George Crabbe’s “The Village” (1783), sometimes cited as inaugurating an ‘anti-pastoral’ tradition in English, a poem that sets out to “paint the Cot,/As Truth will paint it, and as Bards will not”. The notion of ‘value’ plays an essential part in this reality check, I will argue, since what Crabbe’s speaker endeavours is precisely to call the bluff on the dual economy of (economic vs. artistic) value which the pastoral in its conventional configurations had so conveniently and idyllically lumped together: directly addressing “ye Poor”, the speaker asks whether “O’ercome by labour, and bow’d down by time,/Feel you the barren flattery of a rhyme?”
In order to underline the centrality of Crabbe’s text for the pastoral mode as well as for economic criticism of the period, I will situate my reading of “The Village” both within its broader socio-economic context (enclosure, rural flight and migration, internationalisation of trade) but also in a literary tradition of early Romantic pastoral (Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village”, Gray’s “Elegy”) which uses the village setting as a indicator for the changing economies of commercial and artistic value.
I will finish my paper with a dual outlook on the further fate of the pastoral. First, I will address what is arguably its orthodox Romantic manifestation and read Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s escapist meanderings to find “the passions of men […] incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature” (Preface) as an attempt to re-unite the dual economy of value under the primacy of (very much capitalised) Poetry. Finally, I will ask if the current resurgence of pastoral texts and criticism within an ecocritical framework offers similarly paradigm-changing potential than Crabbe’s poem, and whether the village and the countryside could once more become the sites where the relation of economic, artistic and ethical values are being negotiated.
Bio: Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany
Wolfgang Funk is currently academic staff member (WissenschaftlicherAngestellter) at the department of English Literature and Culture at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, where he is working on a post-doc project on late Victorian women poets and their use of evolutionary imagery. His other research interests include New Formalism, the representation of artificial intelligence, questions of authenticity in contemporary fiction as well as the writing of Hilary Mantel. He is the author of The Literature of Reconstruction: Authentic Fiction in the New Millennium (Bloomsbury, 2015) and an introduction to Gender Studies (in German; utb, 2017; 2nd revised ed. 2024). He is the co-editor of The Aesthetics of Authenticity: Medial Constructions of the Real (transcript, 2012) as well as special issues of EJES on Poetry, Science and Technology (2018) and JSBC on Victorian Reproductions (2024).