Elements of Pastoral Literary Mode in Alan Hollinghurst’s the Swimming-Pool Library

ELEMENTS OF PASTORAL LITERARY MODE IN ALAN HOLLINGHURST’S THE

SWIMMING-POOL LIBRARY

Summary: This essay 's purpose is to explore the use of the pastoral technique as a specific dominion for English homoerotic literature, focusing on Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Swimming-pool Library. I make an attempt to look into the main features of classic pastoral mode incorporated in English landscape culture and also to find the contrasting characteristics of anti-pastoral literature. This essay, therefore, is meant to determine whether and, if so, how the pastoral traditions are made use of, in the process of re-establishing the technique of pastoral presentation to serve the needs of gay writing at the end of the twenty-first century.

The term pastoral is used in three broadly different ways. The pastoral is a historical form with a long tradition which began in poetry, developed into drama and more recently could be recognized in novels.[1] It is the use of it, in novels, what is of a special interest for my essay; therefore, I will focus on the course of its evolving as a literary mode which reverberates powerfully in many recent works and more specifically in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library. Considering the tendencies of literary devices as regards their transformation and reformulation in fiction, the challenge of this paper lies in discovering the particular usage of the pastoral literary mode in the novel and also to demonstrate how, taking into account the use of anti-pastoral, it outclasses the classically known application of former. I will also make an attempt to find an answer to the question what has made this tradition to be so closely related to homoerotic literature.

In its essence, the pastoral literary mode depicts a utopian scene of countryside with the naturalness and innocence of its inhabitants, which is displayed in a direct contrast to the decadent urban life. Although pastoral works are written from the point

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