Pastoral

Pastoral is an artistic mode that idealizes rural life and landscapes, often contrasting them with urban society. It appears in poetry, drama, music, painting, and other arts.

Theocritus: An ancient Greek poet whose Idylls helped establish literary pastoral. His Idylls made shepherds and imagined countryside central to the genre.
Pastoral elegy: A poem that mourns a death through pastoral imagery and conventions. It turns grief into a shepherd’s lament within an idealized landscape.
Urbanization: The growth of cities and the increasing concentration of people in urban areas. Pastoral works often define rural simplicity against expanding urban life.
Pastoral poetry: Poetry that idealizes rural settings and often draws on shepherds, song, and country life. Lyric poems are the mode’s most enduring literary expression.
Pastoralism: A way of life based chiefly on raising livestock and moving herds to grazing land. The mode’s shepherd figures draw on, but do not simply represent, pastoral livelihoods.
Virgil: A Roman poet whose Eclogues adapted Greek pastoral poetry into Latin. The Eclogues became a model for later European pastoral writing.
Pastoral romance: A prose or verse narrative of love and adventure in an idealized rural setting. It extends pastoral conventions from lyric scenes into sustained stories.
Industrialization: The shift toward machine production, factories, and industrial economies. Industrial change sharpened pastoral nostalgia for land and older ways of life.
Pastoral drama: Drama set in an idealized countryside and shaped by pastoral conventions. The mode’s rural characters and conflicts also became theatrical.
The pastoral ideal: An imagined vision of rural life as simpler, more harmonious, or more authentic than urban life. This ideal is the social fantasy that pastoral art both invokes and examines.

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