What Is Pastoral?

by Paul Alpers

• ISBN13: 9780226015163
• ISBN10: 0226015165
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2011-03-15
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press

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 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

Author Biography

Paul Alpers is the Class of 1942 Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Frequently

Cited Works Prologue

Representative Anecdotes and Ideas of Pastoral

Mode and Genre

Pastoral Convention

Representative Shepherds

Pastoral Speakers

Pastoral Lyrics and Their Speakers

Modern Pastoral Lyricism

Pastoral Narration

Pastoral Novels

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.