| FA-53791-08 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Katherine Clover Little | The Emergence of the Pastoral Mode in 16th-Century English Poetry | 1/1/2009 - 12/31/2009 | $50,400.00 | Katherine | Clover | Little | | | | Regents of the University of Colorado, Boulder | Bronx | NY | 10458-9993 | USA | 2007 | British Literature | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 |
This project offers a new literary history of the pastoral mode in England, one that understands the emergence of pastoral in the sixteenth century as a deliberate response to a medieval poetry of rural labor. It takes as its focus the first writers of eclogues, Alexander Barclay, Barnabe Googe, and Edmund Spenser, and argues that their attempts to write a new, Virgilian shepherd in the pastoral mode are hanted by the medieval rural laborer and the religious reformism with which he was associated: the shepherd-priests of the ecclesiastical pastoral and the plowmen of William Langland's Piers Plowman and the Piers Plowman tradition. Early pastoral thus demonstrates a struggle over the significance of labor: should the shepherd invoke "otium" [leisure] or the reformist value of rural labor, a value inherited from the medieval tradition? In claiming medieval poetry as another past for pastoral, this project challenges the boundary between the medieval and early modern. |