What Is Pastoral?

In this work, the 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 aims to bring the story of the pastoral tradition, previously limited to classical and Renaissance literature, into the 20th century. Pastoral re-emerges 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.