"In this comparative study of Honore d'Urfe's L'Astree and Charles Sorel's Le berger extravagant, Leonard Hinds examines the historical transition from the idealist, pastoral romance to the more realist antiromance. By analyzing the literary conventions shared by both works, Hinds traces the transformation of poetic forms, courtly language, polemics, emblematic representation, and character depiction in Sorel's parody of the pastoral.".

"Basing his inquiry on Mikhail Bakhtin's and Julia Kristeva's theories of discourse, he focuses on the linguistic transformation of source texts in d'Urfe's pastoral and the altering of d'Urfe's language in the hands of Sorel."--BOOK JACKET.