SHEPHERD NOVEL: CHARACTERISTICS, REPRESENTATIVES, WORKS - LITERATURE

The pastoral novel, in universal literature, is that literary genre of prose that is characterized by its idealization of pastoral life and peasant life in general. It also has forays into sentimental episodes that express the Renaissance spirit (hence this is an Italianate genre).

The initiator of this type of novel was Theocritus in the 3rd century BC. Although it was not until the 16th century when this narrative form reached its maximum splendor with authors such as Jorge de Montemayor.

Regarding the context, the pastoral novel is a Renaissance genre that is located in the Spanish Golden Age and that had its direct origins in Italy and later in Portugal. Shortly after, it was developed in the Spanish language and from there, after its growing popularity, it passed to the rest of Europe, with greater emphasis on France, Germany and England.

The influence on certain writers was such that many used it to go one step further in the letters and create new literary forms.

Evolution of the pastoral novel

The development of the pastoral novel is situated under two fundamental frameworks. The first of them refers to the passage of this genre through the 15th and 16th centuries, with its entry into the Renaissance. And the second involves the groups of texts that were composed during the Spanish Golden Age, a period of important prominent writers.

As mentioned, the pastoral novel is a genre characterized by the shepherds' dialogue about love that comes from Italy. This is because its initiator was the Italian writer Jacopo Sannazaro (1458-1530) with his Arcadia, published in 1504.

In turn, contemporaries of Sannazaro such as the Portuguese Bernardim Ribeiro (1482-1552) published works of the same style as Menina e moça (Menina and girl, in Spanish), after his death.

In this sense, Ribeiro's novel was not declared entirely pastoral, although it was the first novel of its kind in the Iberian Peninsula, while Sannazaro's was the pioneer in being written in a Romance language.

Shortly after, Jorge de Montemayor (1520-1561) published The Seven Books of Diana (1558), a Portuguese who wrote the first shepherds novel in the Spanish language.

As data, Jorge de Montemayor wrote his Diana based on a translation made of the Dialogues of Love (published in 1535) and whose author was León Hebreo, a Portuguese Jewish doctor who was expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492.

Consequently, Montemayor did more than lay one of the foundational stones of the pastoral novel, that is, he undertook to give continuity to a literary tradition that dated back much earlier.

In this way, the pastoral novel, which at first was cultivated in Romance languages (it was even written in French), soon spread to the Germanic languages, which is why they were read in England and Germany.

In fact, it is known that Shakespeare must have had knowledge of some copies of these stories that were translated into English by means of the Hispanist Bartholomew Young, who was well acquainted with Montemayor's work.

Later, the pastoral novel exerted its influence on authors such as Miguel de Cervantes and his Galatea, published in 1585, in addition to the respective parody that the same writer makes in his Don Quixote.

In this classic of Hispanic narrative and universal literature, Cervantes tells how a priest saved Diana de Montemayor from the fire, to whom he wanted a minor edition to be made in which a scene that did not seem to him was censored. nice.

Characteristics of the pastoral novel

Although the pastoral novel was no more successful than the chivalric novel, it is true that it introduced a series of novel aspects.

In this sense, this genre introduced different themes in the same story. Therefore the reader could find that in the same book there were arguments that ranged from the pastoral to the chivalrous and from the Moorish to the border. In this way, this genre was representing a new generation of creative Spaniards.

In relation to the above, the pastoral novel influenced the creation of the modern novel with Cervantes gifts. In turn, the pastoral novel draws on the eclogue where the shepherds are in a pleasant place that does not need a specific place to tell the love affairs they deal with without altering the core of the narrative.

In sum, the pastoral novel has a Virgilian essence, with a tradition that recalls his Bucólicas de Virgilio and that are versioned in Sannazaro. (The authors of the Golden Age were ardent admirers of the classical Latin poet.)

Of course, the shepherds novel has a lyric that refers to the Castilian traditions and the drama of the eclogues that were already exhibited at the end of the 15th century but that mature in the 16th century, that is, when the genre reaches its zenith.

The essence of the pastoral novel, in this way, has ups and downs that go from comedy to tragedy, with a vast literary variety that is observed in its linguistic registers and also in the complexity of its feelings.

For its part, the eclogue takes advantage of its way of establishing a connection between the plane in which the events are described and the reality that is outside the text, which is nothing but the vicissitudes that exist in love.

In addition, the pastoral novel does not complicate the literary universe, but rather simplifies it and makes it focus on the feelings that are experienced, or more specifically, on the feelings of its characters, which take some licenses in relation to its link with society.

Thus, the pastoral story is experimental, since the author tests the relationships of affection in conjunction with the rhetoric with which it is written and described. In other words, the pastoral novel is experimental because it is written by trial and error, that is, the author of this genre tries different options, shuffles them and writes them.

However, the result is far from being mediocre and condemned to oblivion since the pastoral novel is achieved, as mentioned, hook into the posthumous literary tradition.

In this way, rebirth is key in the creation of this genre since it revitalizes ideas that were believed to have disappeared or forgotten, among them the ideas of the Greco-Roman classics.

In summary, and starting from the preceding descriptions, the characteristics of the pastoral novel are the following:

Many arguments and plots in the same story.
The place of the narration is not precise.
The theme of the novel is love.
The pastoral structure is reminiscent of the Greco-Roman classics.
Events vary between tragedy and comedy.
His literary universe is as simple as his characters.
The characters don't always abide by the norms of society.
The rhetoric and language of the novel are experimental.
There is a hunger to explore ways to overcome chivalric novels.
The main literary source is from the Italian Renaissance.

Languages of the pastoral novel

The pastoral novel was written in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, although there are also redactions in French, English and German, although to a lesser extent.

The preeminence of this literary genre, however, encompassed Spanish literature, in which, given its popularity, it was translated into other languages that were a vehicle for the most famous authors of that time, such as William Shakespeare, to base portions of some of his most outstanding works.

Representatives

Jacopo Sannazaro (1458-1530).
Bernardim Ribeiro (1482-1552).
Jorge de Montemayor (1520-1561).
Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616).

Outstanding works

La Diana (1558), by Jorge de Montemayor.
La Diana in love (1564), by Gaspar Gil Polo.
La Galatea (1585), by Don Miguel de Cervantes.
La Arcadia (1598), by the famous Lope de Vega.

References

Alatorre, Antonio (1998). "The text of Diana de Montemayor". Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 46 (2), pp. 407-18.
Alvar, Carlos; Mainer, José Carlos and Navarro Durán, Rosa (2014). Brief history of Spanish literature, 2nd edition. Madrid: Editorial Alliance.
Cristina Castillo Martínez (2005). Shepherd's Books Anthology. Alcalá de Henares: Center for Cervantes Studies.
Gies, David T. (2008). The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Guardiola, María Luisa (2001). Introduction to Spanish literature; Glossary of useful terms. Pennsylvania, United States: Swarthmore College. Recovered from swarthmore.edu.
Lauer, A. Robert (2006). The Pastoril Novel. Oklahoma, United States: University of Oklahoma. Recovered from faculty-staff.ou.edu.
Montero, Juan (No year). Pastoral novel; Presentation. Madrid, Spain: Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library. Recovered from cervantesvirtual.com.
Trazegnies Granda, Leopoldo de (2007). Literary dictionary. Seville, Spain: Virtual Library of Literature. Recovered from trazegnies.arrakis.es.

SHEPHERD NOVEL: CHARACTERISTICS, REPRESENTATIVES, WORKS - LITERATURE - 2025