View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What kind of lifestyle does Marx say Americans want?

2. For what occasion did Jefferson write his Notes on Virginia?

3. What other American literature does Marx say exemplifies the three-stage theme he identified in Shakespeare's 'The Tempest'?

4. What form of art had reached a peak in Thomas Jefferson's time?

5. What did Jefferson want to keep in Europe?

Short Essay Questions

1. Why was Beverly ultimately disappointed in the New World?

2. What characters does Marx cite as examples of people who have gone through those three stages?

3. How does Shakespeare demonstrate the impossibility of the pastoral ideal?

4. What are the three spatial stages a person goes through in pastoral ideal?

5. What does Marx mean when he says that America offered a middle way for men?

6. What is the sentimental pastoral ideal?

7. In what way does the railroad symbolize the industrial intrusion into a pastoral idyll?

8. What view typified the opposite of the bountiful-Edenic image of the New World?

9. How did colonists see America?

10. How had Shakespeare learned about conditions in America?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Do you think that there was ever a 'good place in nature' or is this concept itself a nostalgic imposition on the experience of loss, and the acquisition of civilization?

Essay Topic 2

Manufacturing was both an evil and a source of national strength in the 18th century. How did manufacturing change the idea of industrialism, and did the acquisition of manufacturing strength redeem the loss of natural land? Who argued that it did? Who argued that it did not?

Essay Topic 3

How does race factor into the experience of America pastoralism? What role did the Africans, slaves, and Native Americans have in the landscape? Was race a taint? (Was race a taint for whites as well?) Were they just emblems of nature to be treated like any other natural resource, or did pastoralism extend to the possibility of black white and red men running the earth in common?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 683 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample