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The Dark Pastoral: A Trope for the Anthropocene

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German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene

Part of the book series: Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment ((LCE))

Abstract

This chapter addresses the challenges of portraying radically altered ecological systems as a human story in an era of global anthropogenic impact, exploring how to combine traditional literary tropes like the pastoral with more recent forms such as climate fiction. The dark pastoral trope builds on the pastoral’s long and rich, albeit problematic, literary tradition featuring human beings in highly aestheticized landscapes and re-contextualizes it within the Anthropocene’s dark drama of floods, earthquakes, storms, nuclear explosions, and climate change. Texts such as Goethe’s Werther, Kleist’s Earthquake in Chili, Storm’s The Dykemaster, Pausewang’s The Cloud, and Trojanow’s The Lamentations of Zeno posit various pastoral moments only to rupture and re-shape them with disasters that nevertheless highlight the human enmeshment with the non-human.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Trinity University, San Antonio, TX, USA

    Heather I. Sullivan

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  1. Heather I. Sullivan
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Caroline Schaumann

  2. Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, USA

    Heather I. Sullivan

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Sullivan, H.I. (2017). The Dark Pastoral: A Trope for the Anthropocene. In: Schaumann, C., Sullivan, H. (eds) German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54222-9_3

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