Hiltner (English, U. of California-Santa Barbara) makes this concession to mainstream criticism that Renaissance English pastoral poetry is sometimes, maybe even most of the time, a figurative
mode masking political controversies. That said, he contends that it is also frequently concerned with literal landscapes, even though it does little to describe them. He further argues that
early modern England was in the throes of what can only be described as a modern environmental crisis, which engendered a number of contemporary debates, some of which address issues of
environmental justice that informed, and were informed by both canonical and non-canonical literature of the period. Considering in turn literary issues and environmental problems, he discusses
the nature of art, what else pastoral was in the Renaissance, representing air pollution in early modern London, and environmental protest literature of the Renaissance. Annotation 穢2011 Book
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