What is the pastoral?

The 'pastoral' is a literary tradition or genre, which is commonly associated with its conventional focus on idealised country life, hailing from ideas of the Classical utopian country setting of 'Arcadia'. Inherited into Western culture, in literature its developed into a far more complex genre; notably used by reknowned writers such as Blake or Shakespeare in their poetry or as a setting in his comedies, modern and contemporary writers have used the conventions of this genre and its idealised imagining of the countryside to further explore the themes this concept provokes. These themes include man's relationship with the landscape, modern issues of climate change, the urban versus the pastoral and the reality of manual labour.