Poetry of Paradoxes : Rereading the intertextual dialogue between the pastoral and the anti-pastoral attitudes present in "The Deserted Village" by Oliver Goldsmith and in "The Village" by George Crabbe

This thesis investigates the rhetorical conflict between the pastoral and anti-pastoral moods present in the pastoral poetry of the neoclassical period. I shall start out with a historiographical analysis of the emergence and critical reception of the pastoral in order to obtain a better understanding of the genre’s lyrical program and its semantic potentials. I shall closely examine the first Greek and Latin examples of the pastoral, tracing back the divide between the pastoral and the anti-pastoral to the genre’s very roots. Afterwards, I shall move on to close read two neoclassical pieces of pastoral poetry, “The Deserted Village” by Oliver Goldsmith and “The Village” by George Crabbe, considering their respective speeches as the two halves of a single intertextual pastoral dialogue. Reading them together, I hope to capture the essence of the complex relationship between the two poems’ interpretation and handling of the pastoral. The aim of the paper is to revisit the genre definition of the neoclassical pastoral, questioning the currently employed overly simplified classification, which artificially divides the pastoral into two separate subgenres, the pastoral and the anti-pastoral. In this thesis, I attempt to unify the pastoral and anti-pastoral lyrical traditions simultaneously present in pastoral verses into a single mode of poetry and, thus, highlight the great rhetorical and semantic dimensions available to this genre of sublime self-contradiction.