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

Short Answer Questions

1. What is the most important part of Shakespeare's 'The Tempest', in Marx's estimation?

2. How were frontiersmen typically portrayed by easterners in Jefferson's time?

3. What does Marx say is unique about pastoralism in the industrial age in America?

4. How have the relationships between the city and country changed in American industrial pastoralism?

5. What was the opposite of Barlowe's experience in his travels?

Short Essay Questions

1. When did complex pastoral ideology begin to appear in American culture?

2. What is complex pastoral ideology?

3. How long does Marx say the pastoral ideal has endured?

4. What is the pastoral ideal?

5. How did Shakespeare's characters describe the ideal society?

6. How did Jefferson describe the frontier in his Notes on Virginia?

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

8. How had Shakespeare learned about conditions in America?

9. How had the Enlightenment changed pastoral thought by the time of Jefferson?

10. How did Jefferson separate America and Europe in his Notes on Virginia?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

How do women experience the pastoral ideal? Are men's and women's experiences of nature and the simple life different? What is it in male or female nature or in Western culture that accounts for the difference?

Essay Topic 2

Which literary forms are most appropriate to the pastoral life, poetry, fiction or the non-fiction essays like Emerson and Thoreau wrote? Is there a literature form that corresponds to experience?

Essay Topic 3

Some writers describe pastoralism as a contradiction or paradox, between the good life and civilization on one hand and savagery on the other. How do authors strike this paradox, without falling off into a fixed idea, or stable definition, on one hand, or all-encompassing overreach on the other? How do authors keep the paradox alive?

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This section contains 693 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample