What Is Pastoral?University of Chicago Press, Mar 15, 2011 - 444 pages One of the enduring traditions of Western literary history, pastoral is often mischaracterized as a catchall for literature about rural themes and nature in general. In What Is Pastoral?, distinguished literary historian Paul Alpers argues that pastoral is based upon a fundamental fiction—that the lives of shepherds or other socially humble figures represent the lives of human beings in general. Ranging from Virgil's Eclogues to Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Hardy and Frost, this work brings the story of the pastoral tradition, previously limited to classical and Renaissance literature, into the twentieth century. Pastoral reemerges in this account not as a vehicle of nostalgia for some Golden Age, nor of escape to idyllic landscapes, but as a mode bearing witness to the possibilities and problems of human community and shared experience in the real world. A rich and engrossing book, What Is Pastoral? will soon take its place as the definitive study of pastoral literature. "Alpers succeeds brilliantly. . . . [He] offers . . . a wealth of new insight into the origins, development, and flowering of the pastoral."—Ann-Maria Contarino, Renaissance Quarterly |
From inside the book
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Page ix
... give convincing critical accounts that are also accu- rately suggestive in their implications and extensions . The answer to the question posed in the title is that pastoral is a literary mode based on what Kenneth Burke calls a ...
... give convincing critical accounts that are also accu- rately suggestive in their implications and extensions . The answer to the question posed in the title is that pastoral is a literary mode based on what Kenneth Burke calls a ...
Page xi
... give an inadequate account of its place in literary history , because what is at stake in that argument is the situation of poetry in Elizabe- than culture , not the character of pastoral in and by itself.3 Nor can my account of certain ...
... give an inadequate account of its place in literary history , because what is at stake in that argument is the situation of poetry in Elizabe- than culture , not the character of pastoral in and by itself.3 Nor can my account of certain ...
Page 3
... give it . Some of the reasons are brought out , unwittingly , by a powerful moment in Irving Howe's introduction to a translation of Primo Levi's novel , If Not Now , When ? Howe recalls an episode in Levi's earlier book , If This Is a ...
... give it . Some of the reasons are brought out , unwittingly , by a powerful moment in Irving Howe's introduction to a translation of Primo Levi's novel , If Not Now , When ? Howe recalls an episode in Levi's earlier book , If This Is a ...
Page 6
... give us our sense of human worth only if we have the kind of space Levi and Jean the Pikolo found on that midday in June and that is represented by the pleasures of the locus amoenus . This is , at least in the present context , a ...
... give us our sense of human worth only if we have the kind of space Levi and Jean the Pikolo found on that midday in June and that is represented by the pleasures of the locus amoenus . This is , at least in the present context , a ...
Page 13
... give a coherent account of its various fea- tures - formal , expressive , and thematic and second , provide for its historical continuity , the change and variety within the form . The basis of such a defini- tion is provided by what ...
... give a coherent account of its various fea- tures - formal , expressive , and thematic and second , provide for its historical continuity , the change and variety within the form . The basis of such a defini- tion is provided by what ...
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Common terms and phrases
Adam Bede Appleton House Arcadia begins bird brings bucolic calls Cardenio chapter character Colin Clout critics Daphnis and Chloe Diana Don Quixote double Dunnet Eclogue Empson episode erotic feel fiction figure final flowers genre goatherd herdsmen human Idyll imagination innocence landscape lines literary lives lovers Lycidas lyric Marvell's means Melibee Meliboeus's mode Mopsus mower naive narrative narrator's nature novel nymphs passage pastoral convention pastoral elegy pastoral narration pastoral poetry pastoral representation pastoral romance pastoral speaker Pedlar Phebe phrase play poem poet poet's poetic present question reader Renaissance representative anecdote Rosalind Ruined Cottage rural rustic says scene seems self-representation sense sestina Shakespeare Shepheardes Calender shepherds Silas Marner Silas's simply singer singing Sireno song speaks speech Spenser's stanza story suggests tale Theocritean Theocritus Theocritus's Thyrsis tion Tityrus Tityrus's toral traditional University Press utterance verse versions of pastoral Virgil's Virgilian voice words Wordsworth