"Paradise Hall" And "The Golden Country"

Four early masters of the British novel in the eighteenth century,namely,Henry Fielding,Laurence Sterne,Oliver Goldsmith and Tobias Smollett,uphold and update Western pastoral to represent conspicuous problems and preoccupations in the city,the court and the country during the then sweeping British modernization.In the meantime,through promoting ancient “pastoral ethics” and localized “pastoral landscape” in their novels,they participate in the construction of modern British ethics,aesthetics and national identity.While idealizing British country houses(“Paradise Hall”)and British farms and fields(“Golden Country”)as rural retreats amidst sweeping torrents of British modernization,empowering them as a “locus amoenus” of pastoral ethics,aesthetics and British national identify,they also scrutinize the glaring social problems,class and national conflict.They compose,in their novels,a pastoral symphony of ideals and reality,love and hatred,hopes and anxieties.Based on a critical survey of Western pastoral criticism but mainly following contemporary British ecocritic Terry Gifford's theoretical elaboration on “the common pattern” of pastoral as “the pastoral process of retreat and return” while integrating critical inheritance from contemporary Ethical Literary Criticism,Landscape Studies and New Historicism,this dissertation studies the poetic origins,historical context,patterns and social functions of pastoral in Fielding's Joseph Andrews,Tom Jones,Amelia,Sterne's Tristram Shandy,Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield and Smollett's Humphrey Clinker,with an aim to probe into the way these four novelists uphold and update the pastoral tradition,how they construct a pastoral retreat and return to the social context,participating in the ethical,aesthetic and national identity construction of the then British society.Chapter One studies the poetic origins of pastoral in the novels of Fielding,Sterne,Goldsmith and Smollett.Inheriting Classical literary memory of the “The Golden Age” and “Arcadia”,absorbing contemporary local pastoral of various forms(especially country house poetry,topographical poetry and anti-pastoral)and the contemporary critical debate on the pastoral between the supporters of Alexander Pope and followers of Samuel Johnson,these four novelists uphold pastoral ideals while at the same time scrutinize rural reality during the then British modernization.Chapter Two probes into the historical context of pastoral in these novels.With the development of Parliamentary Enclosure,massive rural labor pour into cities and urban population surge and cities expand,which fester all sorts of urban problems;Massive enclosure promotes agricultural productivity but at the same time intensifies class conflict between the landed class and the peasants;While sweeping modernization transforms rural British landscape,The Picturesque Movement endeavors to “discover” pristine British pastoral landscape untouched by the torrents of Modernization.The life experience and intense “rural attachment to the countryside” of the four novelists is a product of this social context,and their complex pastoral writing in the novels not only responds poetically to this social context but also participates in the ethical,aesthetic and national identity construction of the then British society.Chapter Three,Four,Five and Six illuminate “the common pattern”(“the pastoral process of retreat and return”)of pastoral in the novels of Fielding,Sterne,Goldsmith and Smollett.Chapter Three analyzes “pastoral retreat ” narrative in their novels: the general narrative and interpolated narrative of the novel uphold the“pastoral retreat” narrative of pastoral poetics,the novels thus exemplifying a narrative frame of retreating from London or Bath into the rural “Paradise Hall” or the“Golden Country”;Chapter Four,Five and Six analyze how pastoral in these novels returns to the “cultural context” of the then British modernization,criticizing urgent problems of modernization and participating in the ethical,aesthetic and national identity construction of the then British society.At the same time,Chapter Four,Five and Six elaborate on the social function of the pastoral in the novels of Fielding,Sterne,Goldsmith and Smollett.With the help of Ethical Literary Criticism Chapter Four illuminates how the four novelists upgrade“pastoral ethics” and participate in the ethical construction of the then British society.Four novelists uphold the critical attitude of the pastoral poetics towards the court and cities,revealing corruption in the eighteenth century British Parliament,Parties and The Army,and the “modern evils” in the cities propelled by urbanization and commercialization.Meanwhile,their novels promote the pastoral tradition of idealizing the rustics,presenting Ideal squires,farmers and cottagers as a group of country virtue offsetting the “homo economicus” and “cash-nexus” in the commercial culture of the eighteenth-century Britain.They also construct “pastoral family” and“pastoral community of virtue” based on love and sentiment.With the assistance of contemporary Landscape Studies,Chapter Five analyzes how the four novelists update “pastoral landscape” of the pastoral tradition to“discover” and promote British local landscape,participating in the eighteenth-century search for the “picturesque”.The four novelists endeavor to present and praise localized British “pastoral landscape”,locating “Paradise Hall” and the “Golden Country” in the English,Welsh and Scottish countryside,depicting or outlining its typical geography.They describe rural plants that symbolize British national identity and carry national memory,especially oaks and hedges.The country houses or ruins in the novels are Gothic,Celtic or Medieval in style that “rival'd the Beauties of the best Grecian Architecture”,which manifest British identity and history.Moreover,they present the English,Welsh and Scottish countryside as a picturesque landscape of “various view”,incorporating typical picturesque elements such as the“Ha-ha” and humble cottages.“Thick Description” from New Historicism,focusing on the marginalized rural characters and anecdotes in the novels,Chapter Six studies how novelists strengthen the critical heritage of pastoral and the realism of novels to put the pastoral ideal amidst increasingly capitalized reality of the British countryside,examining conspicuous social problems,class and ethnic conflict in the British countryside in the process of Parliamentary Enclosure,Agricultural Revolution and national integration.Through presenting patronizing English “Preservers of the Game”,the rural poor marginalized by Game Act 1671,Black Act 1723 and Enclosure yet defending their customary right and the ambiguous “game-keeper” who poach,Henry Fielding,Oliver Goldsmith and Tobias Smollett represent the conflict between the landed class and poor farmers during the land privatization in the countryside.Fielding,Sterne and Smollett represent bankrupt small farmers and displaced laborer during the Agricultural Revolution,scrutinizing the population loss,polarization between the rich and the poor,the problem of the poor rates and class conflict.Smollett represent the unresolved English oppression and Scottish resistance overshadowed by the Acts of Union 1707.In the Conclusion,the dissertation points out that the pastoral in the novels of Fielding,Sterne,Goldsmith and Smollett is not escapist,but an integration of the ancient pastoral ideals and realism of the novel,promoting the critical tradition of Western pastoral.The four early masters of British compose a pastoral symphony of ideals and reality,love and hatred,hopes and anxieties.The “Paradise Hall” and the“Golden Country” in their novels are not simply rural retreats amidst sweeping torrents of British modernization,nor merely “locus amoenus” of pastoral ethics,aesthetics or British national identify,they are also representations of the embattled reality of British countryside during the social transformation from a rural society to an urban one.The four novelists in question incorporate into the new genre of the novel the pastoral in the eighteenth century,opening new frontiers for this ancient literary mode and enriching the new genre of the novel.The “English Experience”embedded in the complex pastoral of their novels could also be a useful reference for our construction of modernization and the “The Rural Revitalization Strategy” in contemporary China.