The Midwestern Pastoral

“This study establishes a distinct genre, the Midwestern pastoral—novels, poems, autobiographies, even nonfiction essays on ecology—that looks deeply into the landscape of the American Midwest, recognizing its underappreciated beauty, mourning its defilement by utilitarian farming practices and urban sprawl, and honoring what is best in its inhabitants, whether indigenous or immigrant.” ~author of Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War

“(The Midwestern Pastoral) makes a significant contribution to cultural studies of American and midwestern literature, encouraging awareness of holistic ethical systems and recognition of the claims of ecological science and history.… The volume is particularly strong in its balanced interdisciplinary approach.” ~American Studies

“The Midwestern Pastoral adds a valuable voice to environmental and literary (and even ‘eco-literary’) dialogue. Scholars will be informed by (Barillas’s) comments on the environment and the five writers he treats. And his five compelling and well-written chapters on Cather, Leopold, Roethke, Wright, and Harrison will send many occasional readers to revisit their works.” ~North Dakota Quarterly

Updating and expanding our ideas about twentieth-century complex pastorals, William Barillas shows us the Midwest through the eyes of an old aesthetic made new. Reading The Midwestern Pastoral, with its fresh readings of Willa Cather, Aldo Leopold, Theodore Roethke, James Wright, Jim Harrison, Ted Kooser, and other writers, is like finding a map to a territory we thought we knew, only to find the landscape more various and interesting. ~author of Nature's Kindred Spirits: Aldo Leopold, Joseph Wood Krutch, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, and Gary Snyder

William Barillas's important new study is wide-ranging and insightful, gathering consequence as it explores the state of pastoral's conflicted present. He demonstrates how midwestern pastoral and its revisionist challenges take on added significance in the twenty-first-century era of globalization, the Midwest as Rust Belt, and, as Frost would say, what to make of a diminished thing. ~author of Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment