Some Versions of Pastoral: Literary Criticism (New Directions Paperbook)

Some Versions of Pastoral is considered a landmark of modern literary criticism.

Mr. Empson sees the pastoral convention as including not only poems of shepherd life but any work "about the people but not by or for" them. Finding examples in the writing of every country and century, from Mencius to William Faulkner or Céline, he concentrates on an analysis of certain works and forms in English literature, several of them, like Alice in Wonderland, Troilus and Cressida, and proletarian novels not traditionally considered pastoral. His chapter on Milton and Bentley is a precursor of Mr. Empson’s 1961 book, Milton’s God. With virtuoso clarity and perception throughout he brings the student to a new awareness of hidden values in individual works and to the creative possibilities of the language.

• Seven Types of Ambiguity
• William Empson: Essays on Shakespeare
• Practical Criticism: A Study Of Literary Judgment
• The Country and the City
• Milton's God
• On Empson (Writers on Writers)
• Seventeenth-Century British Poetry, 1603-1660 (Norton Critical Editions)
• The Golden Notebook: A Novel
• The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays (Dover Books on Literature & Drama)
• Modern Classics the Uses of Literacy: Aspects Of Working-lass Life (Penguin Modern Classics)