Literature and Politics

The 'anti-pastoral' is a dominant theme of much recent landscape and nature poetry in Australian literature. Its themes are obvious enough - how the traditionally urban form of the pastoral has become invested with views which, although inimical to the aims of the traditional pastoral, are supposedly more in sympathy with concerns for environmental sustainability and eco-poetical aims. In some ways this appears to be a default move: the political aims of the anti-pastoral rest on a moral imperative which is superficially appealing and which, at times, seems to override aesthetic and literary concerns. This needs to be interrogated on two fronts: should a poetics of the environment and of nature be subordinated to a pseudo-political agenda - what are the implications and ramifications? The aesthetic consequences? Can such art be judged purely in aesthetic terms?; secondly, how does such language either stabilise or become implicated in the broader political agenda in such a move? In other words, why would someone wanting to save the world try to do it by writing difficult poetry? This paper will look at the 'anti-pastoral' movement in general with specific reference to the work of Kinsella and Minter.

David Musgrave was awarded his PhD in 1997 for his dissertation "Figurations of the Grotesque in menippean Satire". His book, 'Grotesque Anatomies' is forthcoming from Cambria (USA) and he has published widely as a poet and as a scholar of menippean satire and Australian literature.