On The Diachronic Changes In Judith Wright’s Pastoral

Pastoral writing has a long history in Europe and the United States.It later splits into several subgenres and is associated with various concepts.However,pastoral writing in the Australian context has developed in different ways due to different historical and environmental factors.Judith Wright is one of the most representative poets writing on the Australian pastoral,significantly impacting Australian literature.A defining characteristic of Wright’s poetry is the exploration of the abundance of Australian pastoral themes,including the continent’s peculiar terrain and native plant imagery like wattle trees,acacia trees,and flame trees,and these elements of pastoral change with different periods.Accordingly,the thesis examines Wright’s early poetry(1946-1953),middle poetry(1955-1970),and late poetry(1973-1985)to sort out the temporal changes of pastoral in Wright’s poetry.This thesis attempts to discuss the pastoral transformation in her poetry in different periods,with the social background and the poet’s experience taken into account,and to explore the reasons for this transformation.It also explores the ecological viewpoint underlying the poet’s pastoral writing.Accordingly,the study considers how Wright’s investigation of the ecological potentials of the post-pastoral affects the development of the interaction between human society and nature.The paper is divided into five chapters.Chapter One Introduction opens with a brief overview of Wright’s life and work,followed by a look at the genesis of her pastoral writing.Second,it defines pastoral,anti-pastoral,and post-pastoral and clarifies the characteristics of the Australian pastoral.Furthermore,by reviewing the studies on Wright’s pastoral writing at home and abroad,the characteristics of those studies are revealed.Finally,it points out the further research room in this aspect as well as the necessity and significance of this study.The second chapter discusses Wright’s poetry’s pastoral overtones in her early collections The Moving Image(1946)and The Gateway(1953).Considering previous studies on Wright’s pastoral and social background back then to investigate the poet’s construction of Arcadia,which is a harmonious and peaceful pre-colonial Australia.It carries the poet’s nostalgia and dissatisfaction with the status quo and conveys more of the tribal culture that is being forgotten.The third chapter examines Wright’s poetry’s anti-pastoral style in middle collections like The Two Fires(1955)and Five Senses(1963).A close reading of the poems reveals the complexity of the pastoral reflections embodied in Wright’s poetry.To be specific,her poetry celebrates the hardships and grandeur of white pioneering while also expressing sympathy and pain for the harm this pioneering caused to the native people,reflecting the poet’s complex emotions.Through more abstract and symbolic language,Wright’s middle poetry embodies the combination of the poet’s inner reflections and the external landscape and the penetration of these reflections into the pastoral.The fourth chapter focuses on the post-pastoral turn in Wright’s late collections Alive(1973),Fourth Quarter(1976),and Phantom Dwelling(1985),which reflected three main features: the first is a dialectical reflection on nature by poets influenced by Eastern poetics,i.e.nature has both creative and destructive qualities;the second is the poet’s complex feelings toward the land of Australia,which she both loves and carries with her a sense of guilt;the third is the poet’s sense of responsibility toward the land,with a desire to build an organic entity that includes both man and nature and to explore the post-pastoral of shared destiny.The fifth chapter concludes the temporal changes in Wright’s pastoral.Wright’s early poetry constructs an idyllic haven with Australian characteristics that reflect the poet’s desire to be rooted in Australia and her sense of identity with the land.With the poet’s exploration,her mid-career poems show signs of disintegration of her early pastoral dreams,struggling with ambivalent feelings toward her father and the Aboriginals.In the end,Wright finds a “post-pastoral” way to seek reconciliation amid contradictions,that is,to build an organic whole of the white and the Aboriginal,human and nature.And that can help to inspire the improvement of the environmental protection mechanism in Australia and to think about the relationship between human and nature.