Quick overview
Ken Hiltner's What Else Is Pastoral?: Renaissance Literature and the Environment rereads Renaissance pastoral poetry and prose through an environmental (ecocritical) lens. Rather than treating pastoral as simply an idealized rural escape, Hiltner shows how pastoral conventions engage with real social and ecological issues of the early modern period: land use and enclosure, labor and animal life, climate and weather, and the material consequences of literary representations of landscape.
Central arguments (in brief)
- Pastoral is not only an aesthetic mode but an ecological practice: it shapes and is shaped by how people relate to land, animals, and labor.
- Canonical pastoral texts both reflect and help produce early modern attitudes about property, agriculture, and social order; reading them ecocritically exposes those real-world effects.
- Close attention to nonhuman actors (animals, plants, weather) and to material conditions (enclosure, grazing, seasonal cycles) changes how we interpret pastoral tropes such as shepherds, gardens, and the locus amoenus.
- Rethinking pastoral historically allows us to see its ambivalence: it can naturalize domination and exclusion even as it offers alternative forms of relation to the nonhuman world.
Kinds of texts discussed
Hiltner works with Renaissance pastoral writings—both the familiar canonical works and lesser-known pieces—using them as case studies to show how pastoral forms participate in environmental discourse. Expect close readings of pastoral conventions as they appear across poetry and prose from the period (e.g., pastoral episodes, eclogues, Arcadian material, and pastoralizing passages in drama and epic).
Why the book matters
- It expands our understanding of what pastoral can do—moving beyond nostalgia or literary form to its material and political effects.
- It builds a bridge between early modern studies and contemporary ecocriticism, offering methods and questions useful for both fields.
- It is useful for scholars and students who want to read literature in relation to environment, economy, and embodied labor rather than as purely aesthetic objects.
How to use this book in study or research
- As a seminar text: assign one chapter alongside primary pastoral texts (Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, etc.) and ask students to identify how the environmental frame changes interpretation.
- For essay prompts: have students trace how a pastoral trope (the shepherd, the garden, the flock) negotiates property, labor, and nonhuman agency in a chosen text.
- As a methodological model: use Hiltner's close readings to practice integrating historical ecology, material conditions, and multispecies perspectives into literary analysis.
- For theses: adapt Hiltner's questions to other genres or periods (e.g., how do pastoral conventions operate in colonial literature or in later agrarian poetry?).
Further reading (introductory suggestions)
- Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination — for ecocritical theory and context.
- Raymond Williams, The Country and the City — for historical frameworks about rural representation.
- Collections of early modern pastoral and ecocritical essays — useful for comparative approaches and primary-text pairings.
About the author
Ken Hiltner is a scholar who works at the intersection of Renaissance literature and ecocriticism. His work emphasizes how literary forms shape and respond to environmental and material realities.
Practical notes
If you need bibliographic details (publisher, year, ISBN) or want a chapter-by-chapter summary, tell me and I can fetch or summarize that information. If you plan to write a paper using Hiltner's book, I can also help you generate a research question, an outline, or close-reading passages from primary texts to pair with Hiltner's arguments.