Greening the City

Abstract

Literary and artistic depictions and constructions of the ‘simple life’, a way of living combining individual self-realisation with harmonious social relations, within the context of a personally rewarding but simultaneously ethically grounded and empathetic interaction with animals and the natural environment, have been a central subject for ecocritical consideration. ‘Simple life’ texts participate in a pastoral tradition which extends back over two thousand years in Western culture and are rooted in biblical depictions of paradise on the one hand and Greek celebrations of a temporally distant Golden Age or a geographically remote Arcadia on the other. Pastoral is one of the principal ecocritical ‘tropes’ defined by Greg Garrard in terms of content as “pre-existing ways of imagining the place of humans in nature” and “key structuring metaphors”, and in formal terms as extended rhetorical and narrative strategies gathering together “permutations of creative imagination: metaphor, genre, narrative, image” (2004: 2, 7 and 14).