A term you'll meet in literary genre.
Pastoral is the literary genre depicting idealised rural life — typically through the figure of the shepherd, the herder, or the farmer — and using that depiction as a counterweight to (and implicit critique of) urban, courtly, or industrial society. From the Latin pastor, "shepherd." The form is one of the oldest in Western literature, established by Theocritus in the third century BCE and still alive in contemporary nature writing, country songs, and the marketing of organic produce.
Pastoral as a literary genre begins with the Greek poet Theocritus (c. 300–260 BCE), whose Idylls depict Sicilian shepherds in song-contests and conversations. Virgil's Eclogues (c. 40 BCE) adapted the form for Roman literature and made it explicitly political — Virgil's shepherds debate, mourn dispossession, and respond to the civil wars.
The pastoral was always literary, not documentary. Real shepherds, then and now, did not speak in elaborate verse about love and the gods. The pastoral shepherd is an invented figure used to think with — a position from which the city or court can be examined from a vantage of imagined simplicity.
Pastoral exploded in the Renaissance. Petrarch, Boccaccio, Sannazaro (whose Arcadia, 1504, gave the form its mythical setting), Sidney (Arcadia, 1593), Spenser (The Shepheardes Calender, 1579), Marlowe ("The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"), Shakespeare's pastoral plays (As You Like It, The Winter's Tale), and many smaller poets.
The Renaissance pastoral was usually a courtly form disguised as a rural one. Courtiers wrote shepherd-poems as themselves; the genre was a literary mask. Walter Raleigh could write "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd"; both poems participated in the same elaborate game.
Romanticism transformed the pastoral. Wordsworth's poems about Lake District shepherds (Michael, sections of The Prelude) are arguably pastoral, but they are trying to do something different: depict actual rural labour with seriousness rather than use the shepherd as a courtly mask. The Romantic relationship to nature was different — direct, religious, political — from the Renaissance courtly one.
By the nineteenth century, the urbanisation of Europe had made the rural a genuine moral counter-image rather than a literary convention. Hardy's Wessex novels, the American Transcendentalists (see Walden), the early realist depictions of rural life — all worked partly in the pastoral tradition while transforming its conventions.
William Empson's Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) proposed an influential broad reading of the form. For Empson, pastoral is the literary mode that involves "putting the complex into the simple" — using the figure of the simple person (shepherd, country folk, child) to examine problems the complex person (courtier, urban intellectual) can articulate but not feel directly.
This is why pastoral can be politically conservative or politically radical. Conservative pastoral makes rural life seem natural and unchanging; radical pastoral uses the shepherd to critique what city life has become. Both versions exist; both have always existed.
Pastoral has several traditional sub-forms:
The pastoral always invites parody and inversion. The "anti-pastoral" was already present in the Renaissance (Raleigh's "Nymph's Reply" was an anti-pastoral to Marlowe's shepherd). Modern anti-pastoral is sometimes called "realist rural" — depictions of actual rural poverty and hardship that refuse the idealising conventions. The poems of John Clare; Hardy's bleaker novels; Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men in some readings; much postwar regional fiction.
The relationship between pastoral and anti-pastoral is not a simple opposition. Many of the best pastoral poems contain their own anti-pastoral elements within them. Milton's "Lycidas" is a pastoral elegy whose moments of political fury and theological doubt break the pastoral surface.
The contemporary descendants of the pastoral:
The pastoral has not died; it has changed costumes. Its fundamental move — using an imagined simpler life to think about a complicated one — is too useful to literature to disappear.
When a text depicts rural life with idealising emphasis — when the country is contrasted with the city as more authentic, simpler, closer to nature or truth — you are reading inside the pastoral tradition. Ask which version of pastoral the writer is using. Is the shepherd a courtly disguise, a Romantic ideal, a political critique, an anti-pastoral reversal? The form's flexibility is partly its ability to do all of these at once.
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