Abstract

This chapter offers a summary of Empson’s transformation of the traditional literary concept of the genre of pastoral. This involves acknowledging his indebtedness to that traditional concept, but it also involves bringing out the way his redefinition of it as ‘putting the complex into the simple’ importantly depends on an essay by James Smith which brings out a deep internal connection between the traditional category and a range of metaphysical issues, originating in Plato’s concern with the relation between the one and the many, but ramifying in a number of significant ways throughout the subsequent history of philosophy. This sets the stage for the arguments to be made in the following chapters of this book.