American Pastoral Ideology Reappraised¹

Ever since an American literary canon began to crystallize, American literature has been thought of as markedly "pastoral" in the loose sense of being preoccupied with nature and rurality as setting, theme, and value in contradistinction from society and the urban. Systematic attempts to explain this preoccupation in terms of a general theory of American culture are almost as long-standing; they effectively begin with the first thesis book about American literature to endure, D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), and they still flourish. Their best results have been impressive. Yet we have not yet arrived at a sufficiently intricate and cosmopolitan model for understanding American pastoral. After a short review of some of the more important previous studies, I shall try to sketch such a model.