New Versions of Pastoral
New Versions of Pastoral

Author: David James

Publisher: Associated University Presse

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 9780838641897

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Bringing together both established and emerging scholars of the long nineteenth century, literary modernism, landscape and hemispheric studies, and contemporary fiction, New Versions of Pastoral offers a historically wide-ranging account of the Bucolic tradition, tracing the formal diversity of pastoral writing up to the present day. Dividing its analytic focus between periods, the volume contextualizes a wide range of exemplary practitioners, genres, and movements: contributors attend to early modernism's vacillation between critiquing and aestheticizing the rise of primitivist nostalgia; the ambiguous mythologization of the English estate by the twentieth-century manor house novel; and the post-national revisiting of the countryside and its sovereign status in contemporary imaginings of regional life.

What Is Pastoral?
What Is Pastoral?

Author: Paul Alpers

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2011-03-15

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 0226015238

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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

The Midwestern Pastoral
The Midwestern Pastoral

Author: William Barillas

Publisher: Ohio University Press

Published: 2006-02-15

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0821442015

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The midwestern pastoral is a literary tradition of place and rural experience that celebrates an attachment to land that is mystical as well as practical, based on historical and scientific knowledge as well as personal experience. It is exemplified in the poetry, fiction, and essays of writers who express an informed love of the nature and regional landscapes of the Midwest. Drawing on recent studies in cultural geography, environmental history, and mythology, as well as literary criticism, The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland relates Midwestern pastoral writers to their local geographies and explains their approaches. William Barillas treats five important Midwestern pastoralists—Willa Cather, Aldo Leopold, Theodore Roethke, James Wright, and Jim Harrison—in separate chapters. He also discusses Jane Smiley, U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, Paul Gruchow, and others. For these writers, the aim of writing is not merely intellectual and aesthetic, but democratic and ecological. In depicting and promoting commitment to local communities, human and natural, they express their love for, their understanding of, and their sense of place in the American Midwest. Students and serious readers, as well as scholars in the growing field of literature and the environment, will appreciate this study of writers who counter alienation and materialism in modern society.

Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin

Author: Harold Bloom

Publisher: Infobase Publishing

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 0791093697

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A collection of critical essays on Kate Chopin's work.