Dear Ric and John,
I'm enjoying this exchange, and especially the marvelous poem on
the wired over Australian landskip. To detach one strand, Theocritus
and (as) the origin of pastoral, I've always been fascinated by the
question (still unanswered I think) whether pastoral did start there
as an urbane Alexandrian charade, so was urban-here rural-there
directed and had an ironic shuttling between the two built into it
from the first, or whether it was already more thickly burdened than
that (pointing to the non-autonomy of the city) ie based on dim
memories of rural cults and festivals as some believe. That would
make memory the key issue in pastoral, and also submergence or loss
of place rather than a groundless evocation of some weightlessly
remote place (pastoral is not utopia after all).
Peter
Peter Larkin
Philosophy & Literature Librarian
University of Warwick Library
Coventry CV4 7AL UK
Tel: 01203 528151 Fax: 01203 524211
Email: [log in to unmask]
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