Abstract

Against Arcadia: English Mock-Pastoral and Mock-Georgic, 1660-1740

by Brad Quentin Boyd

Doctor of Philosophy in English

University of California, Berkeley

Professor James Grantham Turner, Chair

Against Arcadia: English Mock-Pastoral and Mock-Georgic, 1660-1740 is a study of the receptions of the ancient Greek and Roman genres or modes of pastoral and georgic in the British nations and Ireland by poets of the Restoration and early eighteenth century, in particular Andrew Marvell, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Jonathan Swift, John Gay, and Alexander Pope. It argues that the traditional and still-dominant literary history of pastoral and georgic in English, which sees these poetic forms in terminal decline after the deaths of the "last Renaissance poets," John Milton and Andrew Marvell, is mistaken, and seeks to reconfigure that history.

In the case of pastoral, most readers have proceeded from a mistaken belief that arcadian or soft pastoral, marked by idealizing, sentimental, romance conventions, was the traditional nature of this poetic form and that the waning of poetry of this kind after 1660 thus represented the decline and fall of pastoral. This study argues on the contrary that such arcadian accretions to the main trunk of Graeco-Roman and medieval pastoral in fact date primarily from the widespread popularity of Jacopo Sannazaro's Arcadia and other "soft" pastoral Renaissance texts, and that Rochester, Swift, Gay, and Pope, by their vibrant retrieval of the thematic and contextual reference of ancient pastoral, especially its paradigmatic practitioners Theocritus and Vergil, reactivate the traditional nature of the genre: pastoral had in fact always been highly ironized, philosophically skeptic, and often scabrously sexualized, surprisingly "modern" almost two thousand years before modernity.

In the case of georgic, this study argues, a similar misprision has traditionally led literary history to suppose that the earnest true georgics of the eighteenth century (didactic and landscape-descriptive poems by Philips, Somervile, Thomson, Dyer, Grainger, Jago) were the direct descendants of Hesiodic and especially Vergilian georgic. In fact, this study argues, it is the mock-georgics of Marvell, Rochester, Swift, Gay, and Pope that lay the best claim to that identity, marked as they are not only by ancient georgic's irony, skepticism of ideas of natural innocence and ease, and consciousness of the dislocations and losses of civil and foreign war, in sharp contrast to the earnest, naturalist or optimist, and progressive themes of eighteenth-century true georgics (which are not in this sense "true" at all). Instead, informed in Marvell's case by the experience of the defeat of the republican and Whig cause at the Restoration, and in the case of Swift, Gay, and Pope by the aftermath of the Stuart dynasty's major reverses in 1688 and 1714, they imagine and satirize a landscape, and cityscape, that are gradually descending to political and cultural ruin.