ABSTRACT
First America was imagined — only then was it discovered, and then ‘invented’. Magical lands were postulated in European fiction too, and sometimes they were put to quite specific use. The landscape of the pastoral, whether in Theocritus’s Daphnis and Chloe, Virgil’s Eclogues, or the great romances of the English renaissance by Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare and Thomas Lodge, was an artificial, idealized country setting, away from the distracting influence of the court or city, in which meditations could flourish on the relative influences of nature and culture. The English renaissance synthesized all this classical and medieval myth from oral tradition, from a renewed interest in Arthurian materials stemming from the pseudo-Celtic content of the Tudor myth of the succession, from the general recuperation of the classics in renaissance education, and above all from the intensified millennial fervour of the Reformation.
