SOURCE: Brosman, Catharine Savage. “The Pastoral in Modern France: Forms and Reflections.” French Forum 9 (May 1984): 212-224.

In the following excerpt from a study of the use of the pastoral form in several post-World War II French literary figures, Brosman notes the ways in which Giono and poet René Char use pastoral themes as an antidote to the vicissitudes brought by war.

Although the pastoral, in the narrow sense, has nearly disappeared from modern French literature, certain of its features and conventions, as distinguished from those simply of rustic literature of the pre-Romantic, Romantic and post-Romantic periods, can be identified in fiction and poetry both before and after World War I.¹ In some cases the reflections are oblique, and the work must be considered a contemporary equivalent or transposition of the pastoral. In others the pastoral serves as an explicit model for texts which are, however, modern as well...