The Politics of Sidney's Pastoral
Mystification and Mythology in the Old Arcadia
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 16006995 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Robert E Stillman (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1985 |
| Volume | 52 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 795-795 |
| Publication date | 1985-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | ELH (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-8304 • E-ISSN: 1080-6547 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3039467 |
| OpenAlex | W2319821448 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
Politics and pastoral have been linked as inseparably as shepherds and sheep in twentieth-century criticism of genre. Long ago, William Empson taught us to recognize how essential to Renaissance pastoral is its trick of implying beautiful relation between rich and poor. ' Raymond Williams has offered a brilliant Marxist critique of those mystifications employed by sixteenthand seventeenth-century pastoralists on behalf of a developing agrarian capitalism.2 Socio-political concerns are central also to Frank Kermode's approach to genre; he writes, first condition of pastoral poetry is that there be a sharp difference between two ways of life, rustic and urban.3 Pastoral springs from social conflict, from a testing of boundaries. Even Renato Poggioli, a critic better known for his psychological studies of genre, has supplied a splendid analysis of large role sense of outraged justice plays in pastoral view of social order.4 It would be easy to multiply these examples, but best indication of continuing vitality of critical interest in politics and Renaissance pastoral is supplied by recent work of Louis Adrian Montrose. The vitality comes in part here from a shift in emphasis. Montrose writes, in what I understand as a challenge to contemporary students of pastoral, that criticism cannot confine its inquiry to matters of literary taxonomy and thematics, to what pastorals 'are' or what they 'mean' [the traditional concerns of scholarship]; it must also ask what pastorals do, and by what operations they perform their work.5 By cultural work, what Montrose has in mind are pastoral's social and political functions; restored to their living context in the dialectical process of Elizabethan history, Renaissance pastorals are best understood as vehicles of negotiation in a complex social order.6
Aesthetics · Arcadia · Art · Criticism · Literature · Mythology · Novella · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Financial Crisis of the 21st Century · History · Law
| Citations per year | 0.08 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2002 - 2012 (11) |
| Highly cited | No |