What is pastoral?

by Alpers, Paul J.

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Title Statements

Full title :What is pastoral? / Paul Alpers.

Summary

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.

Alpers argues that the heart of literary pastoral is the representation of herdsmen and their lives. Pastoral does not depict herdsmen "realistically," but its concern with the limitations of their lives, their vulnerabilities and social dependencies, determines its various conventions and usages, including the character of the singing that dominates many pastorals and makes the herdsman a figure of the poet.

Edition Statements

Publication Date:©1996.

Publication Statements

Publisher(s):University of Chicago Press
Place of Publication:Chicago
Language:eng
Publication Date:©1996.

The Physical Object

Description:xiii, 429 pages ; : 23 cm

Edition Identifiers

ISBN:0226015165, 9780226015163, 0226015173, 9780226015170, 9780226015231, 0226015238
oclc:ocm32894169
LC Classification:PN56.P3
Dewey Decimal:809/.93321734

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.

Subjects

Bergers -- Dans la littérature Criticism, interpretation, etc Herderspoëzie Hirtendichtung Littérature pastorale -- Histoire et cr… Littérature pastorale anglaise -- Histo… Lyrisme (littérature) Pastoral literature Pastoral literature -- History and crit…