Title: On Judith Wright’s Post-pastoral in Her Mid-late Poetry

Abstract: Judith Wright’s middle and late collections, Alive and Fourth Quarter, exemplify a direct concern with the Australian environment and a sense of belonging to the land shared by the white and Aboriginal Australians. These two collections deal with familiar themes in Wright’s earlier period in a more transcendent manner, primarily in the form of the poet’s post-pastoral reflections on land belonging. Based on Terry Gifford’s “post-pastoral,” the paper uncovers that the poet shows the play of love and guilt in the internal nature by exposing the duality of external nature and the legacy of Australia’s colonial past. Following this, Wright delves into the complex and deep connection between whites and Aborigines and proposes a path of reconciliation to land belonging, i.e., to transcend the distinctions between individuals through poetry, to integrate white and Aboriginal Australians into a larger whole, and to realize the ideal of a communal society in her mind.

Keywords:: post-pastoral, nature, Judith Wright, land belonging, a community with a shared future

Author: Bingbing Li, Ph.D. Candidate, College of International Studies, Southwest University, Chongqing, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2024.03.011