The Echoing Woods

Book excerpt: For the first time since more than ninety years a survey is offered of bucolic and pastoral, extending from the classical mainspring of the genre to the English 18th cen-tury. The emphasis is on the genre itself, the role of imitation in constituting and maintaining its identity, and on the Renaissance extension from bucolic to the wider and more diffuse phenomenon of pastoral. Therefore the seminal role of Theocritus, Virgil, Dante, Petrarch, Sannazaro, Tasso, and in England Spenser and Sidney is highlighted by means of an analysis of their works in this vein. The subject is of interest for classical scholars who want to become acquainted with the Renaissance revival and mutation of an ancient genre, and for students of English and comparative literature who want to study the important classical sources and the development of pastoral in English literature from 1578 up to the end of the eighteenth century.