Nature as Conscience and Consciousness: the Pastoral Hero and the Sympathetic Imagination
Location
Massey Board Room
Presentation Type
Presentation
Start Date
15-9-2009 2:00 PM
Description
Why is Wendell Berry's eponymous character Jayber Crow reading Thomas Hardy's The Wood/anders, which he pronounces to be "a good book"? And why does Hardy insist that the hedonistic, sentimental Edred Fitzpiers, in his novel The Wood/anders, doesn't have the depth of character to grasp the ideas of P. B. Shelley, of whom he fancies himself a disciple? The history of the British pastoral tradition is long and deeply indebted to classical literature, but the use of Nature as an occasion to reflect on "the mind of Man" and as a catalyst for the development of the "sympathetic imagination," as William Wordsworth evinced, gives it new life and social relevance. The pastoral hero's efforts to resist the encroachments of modern life and its dehumanizing effects distinguished nineteenth-century British Romanticism and influenced not only the Victorians and American transcendentalists who followed them, but even the Modernists and, more recently, contemporary Agrarian writers, such as Wendell Berry, who return and celebrate them-and, yes, recycle them in new ways for the 21st century.
Recommended Citation
Sisson, Annette PhD, "Nature as Conscience and Consciousness: the Pastoral Hero and the Sympathetic Imagination" (2009). Humanities Symposium. 7.
https://repository.belmont.edu/humanities_symposium/2009/2009/7
Nature as Conscience and Consciousness: the Pastoral Hero and the Sympathetic Imagination
Massey Board Room
Why is Wendell Berry's eponymous character Jayber Crow reading Thomas Hardy's The Wood/anders, which he pronounces to be "a good book"? And why does Hardy insist that the hedonistic, sentimental Edred Fitzpiers, in his novel The Wood/anders, doesn't have the depth of character to grasp the ideas of P. B. Shelley, of whom he fancies himself a disciple? The history of the British pastoral tradition is long and deeply indebted to classical literature, but the use of Nature as an occasion to reflect on "the mind of Man" and as a catalyst for the development of the "sympathetic imagination," as William Wordsworth evinced, gives it new life and social relevance. The pastoral hero's efforts to resist the encroachments of modern life and its dehumanizing effects distinguished nineteenth-century British Romanticism and influenced not only the Victorians and American transcendentalists who followed them, but even the Modernists and, more recently, contemporary Agrarian writers, such as Wendell Berry, who return and celebrate them-and, yes, recycle them in new ways for the 21st century.
