“The Famous Republic of Shepherds” (Hall 2015: 382–383): Sarah Hall’s Alternative Pastoral Trajectory in Haweswater (2002) and The Wolf Border (2015)

Résumé En

In most of her writings, Sarah Hall uses the pastoral mode, tapping its complexity in order not only to revisit and subvert its conventions but also to represent and question the interactions between the human and the non-human. The pastoral is thus used as an aesthetic and ethical medium through which the crises of the Anthropocene are made visible. I argue that Sarah Hall’s Haweswater and The Wolf Border, drawing on the origins of pastoral, showcase an alternative pastoral trajectory that allows her to represent the challenges of the current environmental crisis. Through a thematic and formal study of Hall’s novels in the light of new materialist theories, I intend to show that the reinvention of the pastoral mode is a way for Hall to shed light on the realistic content of the pastoral that tends to go unnoticed: the actual working and living conditions of land workers, the political orientations behind rewilding programs, the representation of the environment and the ontological hierarchy that enables human subjects to reify nature and its non-human inhabitants. This alternative pastoral trajectory allows literature to investigate, question and reflect on the current environmental crisis and on our position as human beings embedded in a natural environment.