Pastoral Process

From the Publisher

“This is a powerful, original study, one that richly and often movingly combines simplicity with depth, clarity with complexity. . . . Snyder’s deep and broad erudition is everywhere evident, yet never on display.” —Harry Berger, Jr., University of California, Santa Cruz.

Booknews

Uses close readings of selected Renaissance poems and passages to distinguish two aspects of the pastoral ideal. Finds that the Arcadian pastoral locates the unspoiled paradise in space, apart from the complexities of city and courts, and is accessible for limited periods of recuperation and reorientation. Contrasts the Gold Age mode, which locates the ideal pastoral life in time gone by, always already lost as soon as it is apprehended as paradise. Also notes how individuation, sexual desire, and the internalization of unidirectional time and universal death transformed pastoral landscapes into wastelands. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.