This paper will explore the queer pastoral of Forrest Reid (1875-1947). Yet the Ulster landscape also has its mythologists. Unlike the Republic of Ireland, where the Irish revival made nostalgia a dominant ‘sociological phenomenon’ (Frawley 3), twentieth-century Northern Ireland seemed more inclined toward a desentimentalised landscape and a similarly atavistic aesthetics. The rural Arcadian ‘otherness’ that Nicholas Green ascribes to Western imaginings of Ireland fails is challenged by the North of Ireland, due in part to its history of political violence, its industrial heritage, and its partitioned status which severing it from the primitivist myths of Yeats and Synge.
The North of Ireland has both prospered by and suffered from its resistance to prettification. Queer pastoral: Forrest Reid’s Elysian Ulster
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