Come Live With Me and Feed My Sheep: Invitation, Ownership, and Belonging in Early Modern Pastoral Literature

2011 ◽  
Vol 108 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Huth
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Pastoral Literature

Animal-Human Compassion: Structures of Feeling in Dark Pastoral

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-208
Author(s):  
Diana G. Barnes
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
War Poetry ◽  
Structures Of Feeling ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Pastoral Literature ◽  
Colonial Settlement ◽  
Australian Summer

Abstract This essay argues that animal-human compassion, defined as human fellow-feeling with (and not for) animals, is most urgently articulated at points of crisis in human history, such as the terrible bushfires and drought of the Australian summer of 2019–20. Literary history, particularly of pastoral literature, reveals animal-human compassion as a long-contested structure of feeling. The pastoral template established in classical literature, and refined in early modern literature, sets conventions for proper human-animal emotional relations. These ideals are radically destabilised in Andrew Marvell’s ‘dark pastoral’ civil war poetry. This troubled legacy flows through Australian settler-colonial writing about animals, particularly the kangaroo; Barron Field, Charles Harpur and Ethel Pedley strive to intervene in the patriotic myth-making associated with colonial settlement and Federation.

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