Exploration of ways in which poets interrogate the contradictory relations inherent in pastoral as a genre.

Traditionally, critics of the English Renaissance have viewed pastoral as a static, idealizing genre, aimed at the recreation of an idyllic past. More recently, these idealizing humanist approaches have been forcefully challenged by studies written from historicist perspectives. In Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction Judith Haber complicates the conventional opposition between humanist and historicist criticism by examining the ways in which pastoral poets themselves interrogate the contradictory relations inherent in their genre. Haber explores problems of representation, self-representation, and imitation in classical and Renaissance pastoral, focusing on texts by Theocritus, Virgil, Sidney and Marvell. Her original approach revises current understanding of pastoral as a genre, and raises wider questions about the place of literature in society and the difficulties involved in constituting literary traditions.

Acknowledgements
Texts and abbreviations
Introduction: 'Remedies themselves complain': pastoral poetry, pastoral criticism
1. Bringing it all back home: bucolic and heroic in Theocritus' Idylls
2. Si numquam fallit imago: Virgil's revision of Theocritus
3. Pastime and passion: the impasse in the Old Arcadia
4. Complaints themselves remedy: Marvell's lyrics as problem and solution
Epilogue: farewell to pastoral: The Shepherd's Week
Notes
Works cited
Index.