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Blake's Night
William Blake and the Idea of Pastoral
David Wagenknecht
Harvard University Press, 1973

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The Life and Work of Fedor Abramov
David Gillespie
Northwestern University Press, 1997
Fedor Aleksandrovich Abramov (1920-83) was one of the leading representatives of the Russian village prose movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In The Life and Work of Fedor Abramov, scholars from the United States and abroad draw on Abramov's works, his diaries, and his private writings as sources for examining his place within the village prose movement and within Anglo-American theories of cultural reception.
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The Oaten Flute
Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal
Renato Poggioli
Harvard University Press, 1975

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The Pipes of Pan
Intertextuality and Literary Filiation in the Pastoral Tradition from Theocritus to Milton
Thomas K. Hubbard
University of Michigan Press, 1999
Departing from conventional views of the pastoral genre as an Arcadian escape from urban sophistication, The Pipes of Pan highlights its genesis in the allusive and polemical literary cultures of Alexandria and Rome. Both cities placed great emphasis upon learned invocation and reformulation of poetic models. The pastoral metaphor provided Theocritus and Vergil with tools for representing the contests and confrontations of poets and genres, the exchange of ideas among poets, and poets' reflections on the efficacy of their works.
Pastoral poetry highlights the didactic relationship of older and younger shepherds, whether as rivals or as patron and successor. As such it is an ideal form for young poets' self-representation vis-à-vis their elders, whose work they simultaneously appropriated and transformed, even as the elder poets were represented in the new texts. This influence is reenacted in every generation: Theocritus vs. his Alexandrian forebears, Vergil vs. Theocritus, Calpurnius vs. Vergil, Nemesianus vs. Vergil and Calpurnius, Petrarch vs. Vergil, Boccaccio vs. Petrarch, Spenser vs. Vergil, along with Chaucer and Milton vs. Spenser.
The Pipes of Pan combines multiple strands of contemporary intertextual theory with reception aesthetics and Harold Bloom's theory of intersubjective conflict between generations of poets. It also provides one of the first systematic studies of intertextual and intersubjective dynamics within a whole genre.
This work will be of interest to classicists, students of literary theory, comparative literature, medieval and Renaissance literature, Italian humanism, and English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. All texts are translated.
Thomas Hubbard is Associate Professor of Classics, University of Texas at Austin.
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Poetry Of Resistance
Seamus Heaney
Sidney Burris
Ohio University Press, 1990

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The Ridiculous to the Delightful
Comic Characters in Sidney’s New Arcadia
Robert Nicholas Reeves
Harvard University Press, 1974
Sir Philip Sidney’s comic technique, in particular the comic characters in the second version of his pastoral romance, is the subject of this ably written essay. Robert Nicholas Reeves begins with a re-examination of comic theory in Sidney’s Defense of Poesy, and proceeds to a reading of the humorous in the Arcadia as a happy kind of moral teaching. He discusses devices employed—irony, ridicule, deflation—and the relation of the low comic figures to the delightful elements of the main plot.
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Spenser, Marvell, and Renaissance Pastoral
Patrick Cullen
Harvard University Press, 1970

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The Stuff of Our Forebears
Willa Cather's Southern Heritage
Joyce McDonald
University of Alabama Press, 1998

Connecting Cather's work to the southern literary tradition and the South of her youth

A diverse and experimental writer who lived most of her life in New York City, Willa Cather is best known for her depiction of pioneer life on the Nebraska plains. Despite Cather's association with Nebraska, however, the novelist's Virginia childhood and her southern family were deeply influential in shaping her literary imagination.

Joyce McDonald shows evidence, for example, of Cather's southern sensibility in the class consciousness and aesthetic values of her characters and in their sense of place and desire for historical continuity, a sensibility also evident in her narrative technique of weaving stories within stories and in her use of folklore. For McDonald, however, what most links Cather and her work to the South and to the southern literary tradition is her use of pastoral modes.

Beginning with an examination of Cather's Virginia childhood and the southern influences that continued to mold her during the Nebraska years, McDonald traces the effects of those influences in Cather's novels. The patterns that emerge reveal not only Cather's strong ideological connection to the pastoral but also the political position implicit in her choice of that particular mode. Further analysis of Cather's work reveals her preoccupation with hierarchical constructs and with the use and abuse of power and her interest in order, control, and possession. The Willa Cather who emerges from the pages of The Stuff of Our Forebears is not the Cather who claimed to eschew politics but a far more political novelist than has heretofore been perceived.

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The Voice in the Garden
Andrei Bolotov and the Anxieties of Russian Pastoral 1738-1833
Thomas Newlin
Northwestern University Press, 2001
A groundbreaking study of the pastoral ideal in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia.
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