Gifford, Terry. “Post-Pastoral as a Tool for Ecocriticism.” Pastoral and the Humanities: Arcadia Re-Inscribed. Eds. Mathilde Skoie and Sonia Bjørnstad Velázquez. Exeter: Bristol Phoenix, 2006. 14-24. Print.
Terry Gifford addresses two common and current issues plaguing the concept of the pastoral: “ungoverned inclusiveness” and “assumptions of naïve idyllicism” (15). Rather than utilizing the term “anti-pastoral” to address these concerns, Gifford has created the term “post-pastoral.” The essay focuses on three post-pastoral contemporary American books to address the necessity of examining the insights into environmental and cultural crisis Americans currently face: The Roadless Yaak: Reflections and Observations About One of Our Last Great Wild Places, As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscapes, Gender, and Art, and Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing the American Landscape. Post-pastoral literature is clearly defined by Gifford as “that which escapes the closed circuit of the idealised pastoral and its anti-pastoral corrective” (17). Six critical questions are offered as a means of identifying post-pastoral texts, which highlights Gifford’s believe that post-pastoral is not a temporal concept. For example, he argues that William Blake’s poem “London” and works by contemporary poets such as “Gary Snyder, Rick Bass and Adrienne Rich” can be categorized as post-pastoral (18). Because the ecocritical movement seeks to connect “the critical and creative imaginations,” Gifford argues the pastoral can successfully provide us with “an image of an accommodated way of living” that heals the boundaries separating nature and culture (16, 24).
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