This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.

One of the enduring traditions of Western literary history, pastoral is often mischaracterized as a catchall for literature about rural themes and nature in general. In What Is Pastoral?, distinguished 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 brings the story of the pastoral tradition, previously limited to classical and Renaissance literature, into the twentieth century. Pastoral reemerges 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. A rich and engrossing book, What Is Pastoral? will soon take its place as the definitive study of pastoral literature. "Alpers succeeds brilliantly. . . . [He] offers . . . a wealth of new insight into the origins, development, and flowering of the pastoral."—Ann-Maria Contarino, Renaissance Quarterly

"Pastoral Themes and Forms in Cervantes's Fiction explores the various pastoral dimensions of Cervantes's art, from his early Galatea, which is a pastoral novel, to his masterful Don Quijote de la Mancha. Dominick Finello here focuses on the pastoral's impact on the composition of Don Quijote: its rural backdrop of a rustic Spain; the literary inheritance of its characters and style; its dialogic structure, which reflects that of the pastoral novel; and the vital stimulus produced by Cervantes's direct observation of the effects of imaginative pastoral disguises and mimetic play on its characters, including bucolic games, the representation of eclogues and masques, and other such diversions. The blending of pastoral themes and forms into his fiction has led Cervantes to ring major changes on conventional patterns of the pastoral." "The pastoral's congenial interaction with the creativity of Don Quijote is apparent in the novel's settings and character conception. With regard to the settings, pastoral style in the Quijote focuses specifically on the geographical configuration and rural backdrop of Don Quijote's adventures and eventually places them in the context of the history of pastoral nomadism on the Iberian peninsula. With regard to characters, shepherds, goatherds, farmers, and other rural people appear everywhere in the Quijote; and Sancho Panza is the leading rustic personage from this group. Sancho's felicitous projection of pastoral life reflects his fundamental optimism. Don Quijote is linked to the literary shepherd through his discourse on the golden age, his imitation of the lovelord shepherd in the Sierra Morena episode of part 1, and the "Pastor Quijotiz" scheme, which signals his demise late in part 2. Dulcinea, Don Quijote's beloved, is conceived with both the rustic and literary dimensions of the pastoral heroine." "One of the essential features of the Quijote is its dialogic structure, which reflects that of the Renaissance academic colloquium and that of the pastoral novel. Another vital pastoral stimulus of Cervantes's art is his direct observation of the effects of imaginative pastoral disguises and mimetic play on his characters. The documented social customs involving pastoral mimesis (such as eclogues, masques, and games) indicate that pastoral expression and values have been integrated to a significant degree into the fabric of the lives of Cervantes's characters." "Cervantes's attitude toward the pastoral may be established through direct statements he made about pastoral authors, poems, and books. It may also be constituted through less direct means - such as the abrupt conclusion and subsequent disappearance of pastoral stories from the main narrative of the Quijote."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Why does one well-equipped, well-meaning person in ministry succeed while another fails? Bob Burns, Tasha Chapman and Donald Guthrie undertook a five-year intensive research project on the frontlines of pastoral ministry to answer that question. What they found was nothing less than the DNA of thriving ministry today.