The agency of the idyllic landscape: Entanglement in Theocritus’s Idyll 21

The Idylls of Theocritus stand between imitation and imagination, between the real world and story. Theocritus’s presentation of both urban and rural environments trains our readings on people, landscape, and materiality—and the porosity between them. This article offers a reading of Theocritus’s Idyll 21 and the strong connection it presents between fishermen and their environs, through the lens of material ecocriticism. It shows that the world of the Theocritean corpus is complicated and enriched by material agency and the agentic landscape. This article engages with approaches to imagination, especially new-materialist entangled perspectives that resonate with Theocritus’s cast of characters, which include nature and the nonhuman.