What is pastoral?
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 Wordsworth, 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 means of dealing with the loss, decline, and deprivation that motivate pastoral, and of maintaining a sense of human community despite these woes
Criticism, interpretation, etc
1 online resource (xiii, 429 pages)
9780226015231, 9781283066112, 9786613066114, 0226015238, 1283066114, 6613066117
710995112
Part one
Prologue
Representative anecdotes and ideas of pastoral
Mode and genre
Pastoral convention
Part two
Representative shepherds
Pastoral speakers
Pastoral lyrics and their speakers
Modern pastoral lyricism
Pastoral narration
Pastoral novels
English