Expanding Arcadias: Pastoral myth-making in twentieth-century British fiction

This dissertation re-evaluates the often undervalued pastoral genre and its claims to cultural and historical relevance in twentieth-century British literature and culture, by re-defining "Arcadianism" as a complex attitude toward the past that negotiates the intersections of pastoral with myth and nostalgia. Twentieth-century British writers often describe the nation as wavering between attachment to the past and anticipation of the future, between nostalgia and progression, an underlying tension in the texts I examine. These versions of pastoral simultaneously perpetuate and subvert the traditional ruralist myth of England as a timeless idyllic realm in which aristocrats and their hereditary country estates symbolize continuity with the past.; From around 1880 onwards, the authority of the aristocracy declined while definitions of England and Englishness expanded, growing ever more wide-ranging, complex and undefinable. Against this backdrop of social change, I establish a canon of British texts to exemplify recurrent waves of Arcadianism that well up in response to wartime experiences and to social and economic stresses, in the 1910s, 1940s-50s, and 1980s-the present. E. M. Forster's Howards End often displays ambiguity and ambivalence in elevating the English countryside to mythic planes, but the Great War gives rise to a more intensely nostalgic, compensatory and mystificatory form of Arcadianism in Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier. World War II similarly shapes the Neo-Romantic mythifications of the countryside and of the old social order in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited and in L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between . The increasingly confused boundaries and fluid identities of the postcolonial period inflect the contemporary revisionist resurgence of Arcadianism that we see in Japanese-born Kazuo Ishiguro's deconstructions of the Arcadian myth of England in The Remains of the Day, and in the more universal elegiac consolations of Czech-Jewish immigrant Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. Ian McEwan pushes Arcadianism toward its conceptual limits in Atonement, foregrounding the ultimate constructedness, subjectivity and illusiveness of all Arcadias in fictional memory.; The extent to which these texts endorse or critique Arcadianism thus hinges upon the historical and cultural contexts of their composition. Looking back at a backward-looking myth may also be predicting the future: further resurgences are yet to come.