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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 a consequence of the sentimental pastoral ideal?

2. How had feelings about nature changed by Jefferson's time?

3. How did the first settlers see Virginia, in Beverly's history?

4. What possibility did Marx hear resonating from the Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer?

5. What contradictory aspects of the American landscape came to characterize American pastoralism?

Short Essay Questions

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

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

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

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

5. What is the consequence of the pastoral ideal?

6. Where has the pastoral ideal been apparent in American culture?

7. What is complex pastoral ideology?

8. How does Marx describe the value of Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' in 'The Machine in the Garden'?

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

10. How had Shakespeare learned about conditions in America?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

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?

Essay Topic 2

Is there an essential pastoralism, or is each person's or culture's pastoralism unique to its own context? Does the similarity of symbols and associations apply in every time and case? Read one of the stories or novels Marx analyzes, to see how the pastoral themes might be unique to the individual work.

Essay Topic 3

What part of human nature are people like Shakespeare's Gonzalo or Thoreau or Huckleberry Finn trying to escape from in nature? Where in pastoral literature is that trait accounted for?

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