Extremos labores. Enduring traces of the pastoral tradition in contemporary european poetry (1933–2003).

This dissertation investigates the enduring vitality of the pastoral tradition in 20th-century European poetry, focusing on what are here defined as "strong survivals" of the genre between 1933 and 2003. The study traces the foundational interplay of metapoetic reflection, intertextuality, and sociohistorical tension within the pastoral mode. Far from being an escapist or naïve literary form, the thesis argues that pastoral has served, since antiquity, as a vehicle for negotiating personal and political fracture, especially in times of historical upheaval. The first part of the dissertation reconstructs the diachronic development of the European pastoral tradition, from Theocritus and Virgil to the Renaissance and its later transformations. It then examines the critical and theoretical frameworks — particularly those of Thomas Hubbard, Paul Alpers, Leo Marx, and Terry Gifford — used to define and analyze the tradition. Central to the methodology is a functionalist approach that identifies two key dimensions in modern pastorals: the metapoetic (reflections on poetry itself) and the sociohistorical (engagement with historical and cultural contexts). The second part consists of textual analyses of poems by W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Miklós Radnóti, Czesław Miłosz, Andrea Zanzotto, Philippe Beck. These poets, like Virgil’s Gallus, are seen as divided figures who reappropriate the bucolic mode not to escape modernity but to confront its complexities — war, technological change, ecological crisis —through allegory, dialogue with literary forebears, and formal innovation. Ultimately, the thesis shows how the pastoral tradition, once thought obsolete, proves to be a resilient and adaptable mode for poetic thought in the contemporary world.