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Pastoralism has been variously defined in American literary studies. In European literature the pastoral persisted as a distinct genre and self-conscious literary tradition from Theocritus and Virgil through the eighteenth century. Major eighteenth-and nineteenth-century American authors alluded to this tradition, but they could not really lay claim to it, for as this essay will argue, the European pastoral was inapplicable to the American setting, both socially and ecologically: socially because although early Anglo-America was by no means a classless society, the distinction between landowners and shepherds was scarcely relevant in the young United States; and ecologically because the pastoral way of life, defined as a subsistence based upon herds of livestock, was not indigenous to America.
Leo Marx's landmark The Machine in the Garden employed the concept of pastoral to explain the primitivist and agrarian strain in American thought in the face of modern industrial technologies. In his introduction Marx wrote of how "the shepherd . . . seeks a resolution of the conflict between the opposed worlds of nature and art" (22). But the shepherd, who "is often the poet in disguise," does not, at least in America, herd sheep. In Marx's formulation American pastoralism is an ideology that has mediated conflicting desires for technological progress and bucolic retreat, "a desire, in the face of the growing power and complexity of organized society, to disengage from the dominant culture and to seek out the basis for a simpler, more satisfying mode of life in a realm 'closer,' as we say, to nature" ("Pastoralism" 54). Those lines from a 1986 article updating his renowned 1964 book, as well as a new afterword to a 2000 reprint of it, emphasized the political valence of pastoralism, now also defined as "a left-leaning ideology not based on a progressive world view" ("Pastoralism" 66). Other influential Americanists and eco-critics have revised Leo Marx's work. Lawrence Buell affirmed that pastoralism "portrays a less complex state of existence than the writer's own" (4) and tried to refute assumptions that the pastoral has been a reactionary or hegemonic force in American cultural politics. In an important early contribution to ecological literary studies, Glen Love argued that "wild nature has replaced the traditional middle state of the garden," and that "wilderness has...