PASTORAL PALIMPSESTS: ESSAYS IN THE RECEPTION OF THEOCRITUS AND VIRGIL

Series: Rethymnon Classical Studies. Soft cover, 24 cm, 230 pp.

The essays collected in Pastoral Palimpsests examine nine instances in the reception of Theocritus and Virgil. They cover a 2000-year time span and a variety of topics: the literary and metaliterary importance of rustic pride in the pseudo-theocritean Idyll 20; the linguistic significance of a bucolic locus amoenus contained in the life of Aesop; the position of the piscatory eclogues in Jacopo Sannazaro's poetic career; the imitation of the Virgilian career in John Milton's Epitaphium Damonis; William Wordsworth's complex and carefully concealed Virgilianism; Thomas Hardy's remarkable debt to Virgil's Eclogues and the Aeneid; responses to Virgil's Eclogue 1 in 12th-century literature; the haunting presence of the Virgilian Eclogues in Michel Butor's Mobile; and the aesthetics of pastoral melancholy in Virgil, Miklos Radnoti, and Bob Dylan. Contents: Marco Fantuzzi, The importance of being boukolos: ps.-Theocr. 20 // Richard Hunter, Isis and the language of Aesop // Thomas Hubbard, Exile from Arcadia: Sannazaro's piscatory Eclogues // Philip Hardie, Milton's Epitaphium Damonis and the virgilian career // Annabel Patterson, Too much Virgil? Too much talk? Wordsworth's anxiety of influence // M. Paschalis, Thomas Hardy and Virgil // Th. Ziolkowski, Twentieth-century variations on Eclogue 1 // Fiona Cox, Night falls on America: Virgilian Pastoral in Michel Butor's Mobile // Richard F. Thomas, Shadows are falling: Virgil, Radnoti, and Dylan, and the Aesthetics of pastoral melancholy.