In “Pastoral,” Terry Gifford traces the development of pastoral literature from the classical genre established by Theocritus’ Idylls and Virgil’s Eclogues to its broader use as a literary mode by writers like Shakespeare, Pope, and Wordsworth. He also examines modern iterations of the “post-pastoral” by writers like Seamus Heaney and Adrienne Rich. Attentive to its ideological valences, Gifford examines the persistence of the pastoral mode in literary representations of the relationship between nature and culture, even as authors resist pastoral idealization. The chapter concludes with an overview of what Gifford calls the “prefix-pastoral” (e.g., postmodern pastoral, Black pastoral, feminist pastoral, etc.) in order to capture the diversity of contemporary pastoral literature and theory.

In “Wilderness,” Debbie Lee traces the conceptual origins of wilderness writing to the “wildēors” (self-willed land) of ancient and medieval texts like Beowulf and to Indigenous place-based language and storytelling such as that of the Nimiipuu. In addition to tracing a history of the “wilderness movement” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, through the writings of authors like Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Muir, Lee also suggests an alternative history of wilderness rooted in social and environmental justice and expressed in Black and Indigenous literatures. Using examples from the works of Barry Lopez, Evelyn White, Gary Snyder, Toni Morrison, and Cecil Giscombe, among many others, Lee demonstrates the diversity and range of wilderness literature, arguing that we should think of “wilderness movements” in the plural.