"Pastoral seems a fairly accessible literary concept; most critics and leaders seem to know what they mean by it, and they often seem to have certain works in mind that count as pastorals. But when we look at what has been written about pastoral in the last decades-when it has become one of the flourishing light industries of academic criticism-we find nothing like a coherent account of either its nature or its history.

We are told that pastoral

• "is a double longing after innocence and happiness";
• that its universal idea is the Golden Age;
• that it is based on the antithesis of Art and Nature;
• that its fundamental motive is hostility to urban life;
• that its "central tenet" is "the pathetic fallacy";
• that it expresses (he ideal of otium; that it is "the poetic expression par excellence of the cult of aesthetic Platonism" in the Renaissance or of Epicureanism in the Hellenistic world;
• that it is "that mode of viewing common experience through the medium of the rural world."

It sometimes seems as if there are as many versions of pastoral as there are critics who write about it".

Paul Alpers

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1343259?uid=3738032&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21102525277293