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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. How does Marx characterize Prospero and members of the court?

2. What were the keys to the American landscape, in the views that were the opposite of Barlowe's?

3. How was Hawthorne's description interrupted?

4. What were Beverly's sources for his history of Virginia?

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

Short Essay Questions

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

2. What discovery does Marx say we find in Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer?

3. What contradiction marks the early accounts of the New World, according to Marx?

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

5. How had Shakespeare learned about conditions in America?

6. How does Marx describe the ambiguity of existence Beverly hit on?

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

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

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

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

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 2

Is the purpose of pastoral ideology really to return to society with the knowledge that living in civilization requires killing off and destroying nature? Is the time in nature and return to society really designed to initiate people into the knowledge that civilization is destructive? Or is pastoralism the conscience's revenge against industrialism, a nostalgia that makes it impossible to accept everything industrialism provides?

Essay Topic 3

Is pastoralism a state of tension between nature and family on one hand and civilization on the other--is it something open-ended and eternal--or is it a goal, a way of life that can be lived if the right balances can be struck? What forces tend toward that balance? What forces tend to disturb or prevent it?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 700 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample