Pippi and Ronia <br>Astrid Lindgren’s light and dark pastoral

Abstract

Pastoral as critique

In The poetics of childhood I explore the way pastoral takes shape in children’s literature. Literary pastoral “offers a natural critique of civilization and stands in contradistinction to the ‘unnatural’– machines, laws and customs”. In the literature of childhood, in particular, the green world is “a retreat from the world’s injustices – parental and the extended social world”– and “all that runs contrary to children’s sense of freedom” (Natov 2003, 91). In his book on pastoral, Terry Gifford notes that pastoral always used nature to contrast with urban life and “a delight in nature is assumed in describing these texts as pastoral” (Gifford 1999, 2).