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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What part of 'The Tempest' held special interest for Marx?

2. What was it that Jefferson described as a threat to the moral center of democracy?

3. How have liberal thinkers portrayed the sentimental pastoral ideal, in Marx's account?

4. Where was Hawthorne when he wrote the piece Marx analyzed?

5. What does Marx say is unique about pastoralism in the industrial age in America?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is the consequence of the pastoral ideal?

2. How did colonists see America?

3. How did Jefferson change his view on industrialism?

4. How did Jefferson describe the frontier in his Notes on Virginia?

5. What view did the colonists take of the New World in the early years of colonization?

6. What feature of American culture allowed Jefferson's ideal to survive for 100 years?

7. How had the Enlightenment changed pastoral thought by the time of Jefferson?

8. What discovery does Marx say we find in Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer?

9. What are the three spatial stages a person goes through in pastoral ideal?

10. Why was Beverly ultimately disappointed in the New World?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Write a review of Marx's 'The Machine in the Garden'. What did Marx set out to do in the book, and how did he do it? Did he accomplish his goals? Did he fulfill all his promises? Did he leave questions unanswered? Were there problems or contradictions in the work that undermined it?

Essay Topic 2

Which literary forms are most appropriate to the pastoral life, poetry, fiction or the non-fiction essays like Emerson and Thoreau wrote? Is there a literature form that corresponds to experience?

Essay Topic 3

How does race factor into the experience of America pastoralism? What role did the Africans, slaves, and Native Americans have in the landscape? Was race a taint? (Was race a taint for whites as well?) Were they just emblems of nature to be treated like any other natural resource, or did pastoralism extend to the possibility of black white and red men running the earth in common?

(see the answer keys)

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