AQA LITB3 - Elements of the Pastoral 15/6/10

Has anybody got any good quotes or ideas from critics? For AYLI, Blake or the pastoral poetry?

Thanks han<3. I haven't got those particular ones but it's good that the same basic ideas come up as questions, but just slightly different.

For As You Like It Alistair Fowler (1984) said the play was a "complex departure from the pastoral"

and I don't have the name but the editor of the Arden Shakespeare edition said that "beneath a sunny surface 'As You Like It' touches on troubled territories" and this "would not have been far from the mind of its first audiences"

Also a general might be Roger Sales' (1983) political definition of pastoral "that is is essentially escapist" "came to be used to prevent the questioning of the power structures that underpinned land ownership, and indeed, the complete fabric of society" - could be easily linked to AYLI

I don't have any for poetry, which poems are you doing?

Thanks so much! and I'm doing pastoral poetry after 1945.

Do we need to write about context in part B? Like is it more about 'contextualising' the
pastoral (whatever that means), or do we write about the socio-political context of the texts?

I think in part B it's normally about the time period the texts were written in and the different types of pastoral they are e.g. anti-pastoral, traditional pastoral. So you put your texts into the context of the pastoral? does that make any sense

I thought it went quite well. The questions were pretty fair. I kind of choked on the Brideshead aspect of section B though. I effing hate that book. But overall not bad!