Mode of Program Participation
Academic Scholarship
Participation Type
Paper
Presentation #1 Title
The Nymph’s Reply: Kathryn Stripling Byer and Pastoral Romance
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
This paper takes as its starting point Christopher Marlowe's famous lyric "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," which stands in for a particular brand of pastoral romance that is hyper-masculine, extremely urbane, and hyper-literate. Although Marlowe's poem has elicited a number of responses throughout its reception history, perhaps no one has replied with as much power and nuance as Kathryn Stripling Byer, writing from her adopted home in the Smokies. Byer responds in Wildwood Flower and Black Shawl to Marlowe's posture of male desire, which makes an object of both the silent nymph and her rural landscape, by giving voice to a range of female personae who remain intimately connected to the natural world. In this way Byer follows the model of Lee Smith's Oral History, which similarly ventriloquizes an assembly of female Appalachian natives, and in which Marlowe's lyric plays a central role, functioning as the chosen expression of aristocratic interloper Richard Burlage. Byer also situates her poems within a broader temporal frame, dramatizing the relational failures resulting from these moments of passionate springtime, and offering a fuller vision of the pastoral world that is informed by hard-won experience as well as erotic feeling. Byer, in other words, provides in her work the texture that Marlowe's fantasy lacks, dramatizing the complex courtship rituals of pastoral romance in a specifically Appalachian context, with its own native customs, its own vexed gendered relations, and its own powerful sense of place.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Evan Gurney is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
The Nymph’s Reply: Kathryn Stripling Byer and Pastoral Romance
This paper takes as its starting point Christopher Marlowe's famous lyric "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," which stands in for a particular brand of pastoral romance that is hyper-masculine, extremely urbane, and hyper-literate. Although Marlowe's poem has elicited a number of responses throughout its reception history, perhaps no one has replied with as much power and nuance as Kathryn Stripling Byer, writing from her adopted home in the Smokies. Byer responds in Wildwood Flower and Black Shawl to Marlowe's posture of male desire, which makes an object of both the silent nymph and her rural landscape, by giving voice to a range of female personae who remain intimately connected to the natural world. In this way Byer follows the model of Lee Smith's Oral History, which similarly ventriloquizes an assembly of female Appalachian natives, and in which Marlowe's lyric plays a central role, functioning as the chosen expression of aristocratic interloper Richard Burlage. Byer also situates her poems within a broader temporal frame, dramatizing the relational failures resulting from these moments of passionate springtime, and offering a fuller vision of the pastoral world that is informed by hard-won experience as well as erotic feeling. Byer, in other words, provides in her work the texture that Marlowe's fantasy lacks, dramatizing the complex courtship rituals of pastoral romance in a specifically Appalachian context, with its own native customs, its own vexed gendered relations, and its own powerful sense of place.
