Decolonising Pastoral: Semiotic Freedom in Literature and Culture

This book offers an interdisciplinary exploration of pastoral, a genre that has captured the Western imagination for centuries, across literature, art and music.

Combining the practices of literary criticism and creative writing, Decolonising Pastoral develops a new series of tools for the project of the environmental humanities. With an emphasis on subjectivity and experience, essays and fictocriticism are woven with scholarship and stories to create a fresh critical framework. Six chapters focus on laying out a new synthetic methodology, taking readers on a journey across literary genres, forms and modes, to explore nature both as an organic totality that encompasses mind and matter, and as a source of cultural expression and production. Beginning with an introduction to biosemiotics, the text progresses onto the blue humanities, synthetic criticism and metrics for decolonising pastoral, before uniting the threads together. It discusses works from diverse writers such as Thea Astley, Judith Wright, Ted Banfield, Xavier Herbert, Alexis Wright, Sylvia Plath, T.S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, W.H. Auden, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, William Blake, John Milton and William Shakespeare.

This ambitious and experimental methodology, developing where creative writing and literary criticism meet, will be an important read for scholars, researchers and students interested in literature, ecology, environmental studies and language.

Thomas Bristow is honorary fellow at the Centre for the History of Emotions, University of Western Australia.