SOURCE: Arner, Robert D. “Pastoral Patterns in William Bartram's Travels.” Tennessee Studies in Literature 18 (1973): 133-45.

In the following essay, Arner explores Bartram's account of his travels in terms of his personal discoveries and the impact the work had on future American literature.

Like many of the classic works of American literature, William Bartram's Travels is structured around a three-part pastoral pattern that begins with the naturalist's withdrawal from society, focuses upon an encounter with nature, usually intensely personal and fraught with ambiguities, and ends either with the explorer's return to civilization or with some ironic qualification of pastoral idyllicism. In its broadest sense, the book is enclosed by this thematic and narrative pattern, starting with Bartram's departure from Philadelphia in April of 1773 and concluding in the final sentence of Part iii with his return to that city and to his father's house on the banks of the Schuylkill...