Pastoral and the Humanities
Arcadia Re-inscribed

Though pastoral seems from its outset to have held the seeds of its own demise (Virgil’s tenth Eclogue contemplates the irrelevance of poetry in an increasingly violent world) it has remained curiously persistent as a concept which, according to Empson, ‘put(s) the complex into the simple’.

Each essay in this carefully selected collection on the uses and abuses of the pastoral genre addresses pastoral as a critical concept from different disciplinary perspectives. The book is firmly rooted in pastoral’s classical origins but pioneers the way forward for future study of the pastoral genre. It contains contributions from top international scholars in the field including Paul Alpers and T.K. Hubbard.

Contributions by
Paul Alpers, Luis F. Avilés, Sonia Bjornstad-Velasquez, Brian W. Breed, Michel Briand, Terry Gifford, Thomas K. Hubbard, Andromache Karanika, Francoise Lavocat, Henrik Otterberg, Juan Christian Pellicer, Mathilde Skoie and Jonathan Unglaub

Mathilde Skoie is post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Classical and Romance Studies, University of Oslo; Sonia Bjørnstad-Velázquez is doctoral fellow in the Department of Spanish Literatures and Cultures at Princeton University.