Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer as Post-Modern Pastoral Anonymous College

The post-modern pastoral was born out of ecofeminism, which is a combination of ecological and feminist theories. Gretchen Legler defines the post-modern pastoral in her essay, “Ecofeminist Literary Criticism.” She writes, “[The post-modern pastoral is a] posthumanist construction of human relationships with nature that makes more sense in a postmodern world; a vision that is informed by ecological and feminist theories, and one that images human/nature relationships as ‘conversations’ between knowing subjects” (229). The post-modern pastoral is a work that sees nature as a subject unto itself. Where the original pastoral sees nature and land as an object for humans to use and idealize, the post-modern pastoral treats nature and land as its own being that has its own agency. Some authors of the post-modern pastoral include Annie Dillard, Alice Walker, Joy Harjo, and Ursula Le Guin. Barbara Kingsolver situates herself within this league of authors with her novel Prodigal Summer. Most readers, upon encountering Kingsolver’s text, mistake the novel as a pastoral work, which oversimplifies the interactions between humans and nature and even throws the text in a romanticized light where the work reads like a Harlequin Romance novel....