Critical thumbprints in Arcadia: Renaissance pastoral and the process of critiqueArguing that the pastoral is best understood via its critical and revisionary nature, "Critical Thumbprints in Arcadia: Renaissance Pastoral and the Process of Critique" builds on the work of Harry Berger, Louis Montrose, and Raymond Williams to shed new light on the shared mechanics of pastoralism and its literary criticism and theory. The essay dissects the appropriation of antipastoral discourse by revisionary pastorals and then indicates the ways in which this appropriation is further complicated by contemporary theories of pastoralism. In other words, the argument explores how contemporary critics of pastoralism participate in a "culture" of critique by productively mimicking the critical methodologies of Renaissance pastoralists and antipastoralists like Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Sir Philip Sidney, and thus provides a fundamental illustration of the familiar post-structuralist mantra that the critic is almost incomprehensibly implicated in that which he/she critiques.
