Toxic pastoral: Comic failure and ironic nostalgia in contemporary British environmental theatre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the enduring relevance of the pastoral mode and its potential to offer constructive critique of contemporary modes of thinking, writing about, and occupying those spaces marked off as pastoral. In an era characterised by potentially insoluble environmental crises, there is doubt over the relevance of a literary form which promises harmony and prioritises the status quo. However, I argue that two recent versions of the pastoral—Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (2009) and Thomas Eccleshare’s Pastoral (2013)—provide examples of the vitality which literary comic modes can offer to thinking about ecological dilemmas. Both invert and frustrate the conventional pastoral movement, wherein the equalising effects of release, reconciliation, and return are not realised; and subjects the pastoral mode to actual or threatened displacement—in Eccleshare’s play the forest invades the city, whereas Butterworth dramatizes the efforts of civic authority to evict the green man from his wood—making this failure the basis of its exploration of the possibilities available in an eco-comic mode; finally, in contrast to Terry Gifford’s concept of post-pastoral which makes awe its main affective mode, Eccleshare and Butterworth present what I call toxic pastoral: versions of pastoral in which former certainties are degraded, permitting an engagement with and celebration of the ambivalence in human interactions with the more-than-human world. Each play represents a version of pastoral that is alert and able to give form to the ironies, anxieties, and absurdities that inhere in contemporary environmental discourse.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".