Traditionally, critics of the English Renaissance have viewed pastoral as a static, idealizing genre, aimed at the recreation of an idyllic past. More recently, these idealizing humanist approaches have been forcefully challenged by studies written from historicist perspectives. In Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction, first published in 1995, Judith Haber complicates the conventional opposition between humanist and historicist criticism by examining the ways in which pastoral poets themselves interrogate the contradictory relations inherent in their genre. Haber explores problems of representation, self-representation, and imitation in classical and Renaissance pastoral, focusing on texts by Theocritus, Virgil, Sidney and Marvell. Her approach revises current understanding of pastoral as a genre, and raises wider questions about the place of literature in society and the difficulties involved in constituting literary traditions.

"Haber nicely catches the power that resides in Marvell's commitment to the 'minor' tradition of pastoral, his pursuit of a metaphorticity that recognizes its limits and achieves its distinction by exploiting the ways in which it is not so me other form of discourse, such as history or politics." Studies in English Literature

"Her [Haber's] intelligent analysis of Marvell's gestures of retreat and modest self-diminishment is perhaps the strongest possible comment on her own retreat from the modes of historicist criticism that have carved out the current understanding of pastoral's meaning....this literary study is marked methodologically by a moving nostalgia for the uncompromising, rigorous formalist criticism that seems now, with the entrenchment of the New Historicism, to be lost forever. But like the paradoxical and involuted poems it examines, this book is often able to turn a self-imposed critical limitation into a compelling critical strength." Seventeenth-Century News

"Haber renews the freshness of a subtle and tricky mode that just flat out refuses to die....Haber's slender but elegant book will test the resilience of both the genre itself and its interpreters." John Bernard, Modern Philology