Pastoral And Anti-pastoral

The poet John Kinsella is now recognized as a leading figure in contemporary Australian Literature, who has achieved a great international reputation by embedding a strong sense of the urgent need for environmental protection in his poetry, prose fiction, plays and essays. Therefore, the introduction of his work to Chinese readers is increasingly important in this age when ecological crises are being aggravated worldwide. Although more and more people have been attracted to analyze and research the works of John Kinsella, the study of this Australian poet has been initiated only recently in China.In this thesis I will aim to make a preliminary study of The Silo: A Pastoral Symphony (1995). which is commonly regarded as one of Kinsella's most successful poetry collections so far and has run into several editions. Focusing upon the Wheatbelt in West Australia, this book reveals, from a farming perspective, irreversible ecological destruction of the original native bush by Australian settlers who were determined to transplant British or European fanning systems into this very different continent. By employing his unique "Trojan Horse" strategy, Kinsella has perfectly utilized the Western pastoral and anti-pastoral traditions in his depiction of landscape, hoping to demonstrate the impossibility of recreating in this remote place the European pastoral myth of Arcadia. His "Trojan Horse" strategy in this collection means pretending to embark on a pastoral literary form only to dismantle it. By imitating the five-movement structure of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony (known as "The Pastoral Symphony"), the poet adopts the "pastoral" mode in The Silo to expose an anti-pastoral reality—a negative influence on the environment imposed by the inappropriate Australian agriculture in this area, known as the Wheatbelt. The book mainly keeps an anti-pastoral tone although pastoral descriptions do appear incidentally as aspects of his beloved Wheatbelt fanning life so much appreciated by the poet, especially in his youth.This thesis is an attempt to use the relatively new literary theories of Ecocriticism to look into Kinsella's inheritance and development of pastoral/anti-pastoral traditions by interpreting a group of representative poems from The Silo. The thesis consists of the following parts. Chapter 1 is an introduction of the topic and the aims, together withsome necessary background to Australian landscape poetry and Ecocriticism; Chapter 2 provides a historical view of the pastoral and anti-pastoral traditions in both Europe and Australia; Chapter 3 focuses on some pastoral landscape depictions by the poet in The Silo; Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, the most important parts of the paper, concentrate on anti-pastoral features of Kinsella's West Australian landscapes in the selected poems and explores the poet's "Trojan Horse" strategy utilized in The Silo. The poems selected from this collection for Chapter 4 are grouped into four sections according to different themes related to ecological damage, namely, soil salination, animal slaughter, farmwork as antidote, the sowing and harvest seasons; and those poems chosen for Chapter 5 expose the revenge taken by Nature on the farmers as colonial usurpers. Analysis of the poems is carried out using the principles of Ecocriticism and with the help of ideas of many ecological theorists around the world; and finally Chapter 6 is a conclusion to the whole paper by supplying an evaluation of the success with which the original aims have been achieved.This thesis will hopefully help readers and scholars to learn more about this brilliant young Australian writer and his creative works. Meanwhile, his ecological concerns and anti-pastoral description in this and other collections of his entire works will evoke, in the process of globalization, a strong sense of responsibility towards environmental protection.