Irish pastoral: Nature and nostalgia in Irish literature

The themes of nature and place in Irish literature have been neglected in critical circles, despite the engagement that Irish authors continue to have with both in their works. While cultural landscape is, of course, significant in the shaping of Irish identities, it is my argument that the actual, physical landscape is of as much significance, in that its presence in literature throws into relief the identities being shaped. Irish literature's keen involvement with nature can be read as a verbal charting of not only the physical but also the social landscape. This dissertation will provide an overview of what I will call "nostalgic nature constructs" in Irish literature: recurring ideas of nature often picked up by subsequent writers, in order to build a continuum of Irish identity through the centuries.; "Nostalgic nature constructs", because the Irish literary aesthetic, colored as it is by the "backward look", in Frank O'Connor's phrase, inevitably involves nostalgia. It would not be going too far to argue that Irish literature from the twelfth century on, in its use of nature, is characterized not by a classical pastoral mode so much as of a nostalgic mode.; As an aesthetic modality, nostalgia centers upon a preservation of the past and the longing for lost culture, as in the case of twelfth Irish literature; by the time we reach the era of the Revival, this nostalgic mode shifts its focus to the preservation of a past that the authors have themselves not experienced; in this sense, by the early modern period, the nostalgic mode has absorbed something more of the traditional pastoral. These developments, to be traced in subsequent chapters, retain certain commonalities: despite the changing representation of nostalgia, landscapes remain the site at which the mode is expressed.; This dissertation will explore the subtle complexities of these changes as they emerge in medieval and early modern Irish literature: the way the medieval Irish nostalgic nature construct takes on more traditional---and romanticized---pastoral forms in the early modern period, and the ways in which a changing representation of nature reflects changing cultural and social landscapes.