(Donaldson, Scott. The Suburban Myth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. Print.)
"The pastoral tradition is one of the oldest of Western literary traditions. The Romans and the Greeks celebrated the wonders of nature even before the authors of the Bible did so....In American literature, however, pastoralism is more than a convention. Characteristically, the Virgilian pastoral has been placed in what Leo Marx calls the middle landscape, midway between the wilderness and the city." (92)
