Literary nature and socio-environmental reality in early modern French critical writing about the pastoral

Abstract

Seventeenth-century French authors produced some of the first critical works devoted entirely to the pastoral. In this article, the author argues that examining these critical works allows us to add a socio-environmental layer to our understanding of this literary mode. This article explores Rapin’s Dissertatio de carmine pastorali (1659) and Fontenelle’s Discours sur la nature de l’églogue (1688). As they debate which aspects of rural life should be included or excluded from this classical literary form, Rapin and Fontenelle give centre stage to a problem raised in later class-conscious as well as ecocritical critiques: idealized representations of rural spaces have the capacity to hide the issues of social and environmental change. This article focuses on how their theories of the pastoral address this problem. While the challenges of rural labour and environmental change may be obscured by pastoral fiction, they are given visibility in critical writing about this literary mode.

Keywords:

• pastoral
• ecocriticism
• Rapin
• Fontenelle
• Dissertatio de carmine pastorali
• Discours sur la nature de l’églogue

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 See Paul Alpers, What is Pastoral (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 8–13 for an overview of the history of Renaissance pastoral literary criticism.

2 Alpers, p. 16

3 Guillaume Colletet, Discours du poème bucolique où il est traité de l’églogue, de la pastorale et de l’idyle (Paris: L. Chamhoudry, 1657), p. 12.

4 René Rapin, Dissertatio de carmine pastorali/Dissertation sur le poème pastoral (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014); Theocritus, Idylls, trans. by Anthony Verity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Virgil, Eclogues, trans. by Len Krisak (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

5 Bernard le Bouvier de Fontenelle, Oeuvres complètes, Vol. 2 (Paris: Librairie Arthème-Fayard, 1991).

6 Hilaire Bernard de Longepierre, Nouvelles Idylls (Paris: P. Aubouyn, 1690), p. xii.

7 To name only a few, Bernard Beugnot, Le Discours de la retraite au XVII siècle : Loin du monde et du bruit (Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1983); Juliette Cherbuliez, The Place of Exile: Leisure Literature and the Limits of Absolutism (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2005); Marc Fumaroli’s chapter ‘Le retour d’Astrée,’ in Précis de littérature française du XVIIe siècle, ed. by Jean Mesnard (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1990), pp. 47–64; Leonard Hinds, Narrative Transformations from L’Astrée to the Berger Extravagant (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2002); and Françoise Lavocat, Arcadies malheureuses : aux origines du roman moderne (Paris: Champion 1998).

8 See for example Usher and Goul’s edited volume Early Modern Écologies: Beyond English Ecocriticism (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020); Louisa Mackenzie, The Poetry of Place: Lyric, Landscape and Ideology in Renaissance France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2010); and Roland Racevskis’ chapter ‘Ecocriticism in the French Literary Classroom,’ in Ecocritical Approaches to Literature in French, ed. by Douglas L. Boudreau and Marnie M. Sullivan (New York: Lexington Books, 2016), pp. 21–40. Much more ecocritical work has been done on early modern English literature, and one example that has influenced my thinking in this article is Ken Hiltner’s What Else is Pastoral? Renaissance Literature and the Environment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).

9 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 14.

10 Williams, p. 19

11 Terry Gifford, ‘Pastoral, Anti-Pastoral, and Post-Pastoral,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment, ed. by Louise Westling (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 18.

12 René Rapin, Hortorum libri IV (Paris: e Typographia Regia, 1665); Bernard le Bouvier de Fontenelle, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes habités (Paris: Flammarion, 1998).

13 Rapin, p. 55

14 Ibid., p. 145

15 Ibid., p. 147

16 Ibid., p. 165

17 Ibid., p. 235

18 Jean-Louis Haquette, Échos d’Arcadie. Les transformations de la tradition littéraire pastorale des Lumières au romantisme (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2009), p. 83.

19 Fontenelle, p. 409

20 Ibid., p. 413

21 Ibid., p. 414

22 Ibid., p. 384

23 Ibid., p. 385

24 Ibid., p. 390

25 Jean Baptiste Du Bos, ‘Quelques remarques sur la poésie pastorale et sur les bergers des églogues,’ Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture. Vol. 1. (Paris: J. Mariette, 1719), p. 172.

26 Voltaire, ‘Épître à Mme Denis sur l’agriculture,’ in Oeuvres completes de Voltaire, ed. by Louis Moland (Paris: Garnier, 1877), p. 378.

27 Voltaire, Note 1, p. 378

28 Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 238.

29 Some examples of offending passages that Fontenelle cites from Virgil include: ‘Mes brebis, n’avancez pas tant sur le bord de la rivière, le bélier qui y est tombé n’est pas encore bien séché’, or ‘Tityre, empêche les chèvres d’approcher de la rivière ; je les laverai dans la fontaine quand il en sera temps’ (p. 388).

30 Alain Niderst, ‘La Pastorale au XVIIIe siècle, théorie et pratique,’ Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises, 39 (1987), 97–108, 99.

31 Jean de La Bruyère, Les caractères, ou les mœurs de ce siècle (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1963), pp. 242–43.

32 René Rapin, Hortorum libri IV (Paris: e Typographia Regia, 1665).

33 For the publication history of the Hortorum libri, see Yasmin Haskell, Loyola’s Bees: Ideology and Industry in Jesuit Latin Didactic Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 17–18.

34 Elfrieda Dubois, René Rapin : L’homme et l’oeuvre (Lille, 1972), p. 193.

35 René Rapin, Les jardins : poème en quatre chants du Père Rapin ; traduction nouvelle (Paris: Cailleau, 1782), p. 16.

36 Haskell, p. 32

37 Rapin, Les Jardins, p. 96

38 Ibid., p. 136

39 Haskell, p. 33

40 Rapin, Les Jardins, p. 215

41 Du Bos, p. 170

42 Fontenelle, Entretiens, p. 57

43 Ibid., p. 52

44 Ibid., p. 52

45 Ibid., p. 66

46 Ibid., p. 66

47 Ibid., p. 62

48 Ibid., p. 61

49 Ibid., p. 66

50 Alpers; Hiltner; Melinda Cro and Rachel Paparone, eds., ‘Special Focus Introduction: Conceptualizing an Engaged Pastoral in Contemporary French and Francophone Literature,’ Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature, 43.1 (2018), 1–10.

51 Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1995), p. 32.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sara Wellman

Sara Wellman is Associate Professor of French at the University of Mississippi. She has published articles on ecological themes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature, including ‘Rousseau’s Environmentalism in Pierre Maillard’s La Faute à Rousseau’ (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 28, no. 1, 2021) and ‘L’Astrée in the Twenty-First Century: Environment, Education, and Identity’ (The French Review, vol. 94, no. 1, 2020).Correspondence to: Sara Wellman; C115 Bondurant Hall, University, MS 38677, USA. Email: [email protected]