Literary Criticism (1400-1800) | Pastoral Literature of the English Renaissance - Bryan Loughrey (essay date 1984)

Bryan Loughrey (essay date 1984)

SOURCE: Introduction to The Pastoral Mode: A Casebook, edited by Bryan Loughrey, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1984, pp. 8-17.

[In the following excerpt, Loughrey discusses the classical European origins of the pastoral form and surveys its embodiment in works by writers of the English Renaissance.]

Pastoral is a contested term which modern critics have applied to an almost bewildering variety of works. In earlier critical discourse, however, it had a fairly limited and stable sense, describing literature which portrayed, often in an idealised manner, ‘the life of shepherds, or of the country’.¹ The genre originated with the Greek poet Theocritus (c. 316-260 bc), who entertained the sophisticated Alexandrian court of Ptolemy with a series of vignettes depicting the countryside and peasantry of his native Sicily. His Idylls are not entirely typical of the later tradition, since...

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass