Arcadia ( Greek : Αρκαδία ) refers to a vision of pastoralism and harmony with nature . The term is derived from the Greek province of the same name which dates to antiquity ; the province's mountainous topography and sparse population of pastoralists later caused the word Arcadia to develop into a poetic byword for an idyllic vision of unspoiled wilderness. Arcadia is a poetic term associated with bountiful natural splendor and harmony. The 'Garden' is often inhabited by shepherds . The concept also figures in Renaissance mythology . Although commonly thought of as being in line with Utopian ideals, Arcadia differs from that tradition in that it is more often specifically regarded as unattainable. Furthermore, it is seen as a lost, Edenic form of life, contrasting to the progressive nature of Utopian desires.
31-537: Arcadia often refers to a utopian vision of pastoralism and harmony with nature . Other uses include: Arcadia (utopia) The inhabitants were often regarded as having continued to live after the manner of the Golden Age , without the pride and avarice that corrupted other regions. It is also sometimes referred to in English poetry as Arcady . The inhabitants of this region bear an obvious connection to
62-708: A foremost scholar of the Acadian period. He frequently contributed articles on Samuel de Champlain to publications of the New Brunswick Historical Society, the New Brunswick Magazine and Acadiensis . In addition to document-based research and translation, Ganong prepared maps, took photographs and gave slide presentations. He often collaborated with others. One frequent collaborator was John Clarence Webster , for whom he prepared numerous maps and other contributions. He also took
93-409: A geology teacher from Iowa . They had two children, William Francis Ganong Jr. , a renowned physiologist, and Ann Ganong Seidler , professor of speech theory and children's author. After graduating from Harvard, Ganong was appointed an assistant instructor in botany there. He stayed at Harvard for a few years until May 1894, when he accepted an appointment as Professor of Botany at Smith College. It
124-529: A great interest in the international border between New Brunswick and Maine. Because of this interest and expertise he was asked to take part in the cross-border tercentennial celebrations on the St. Croix River in 1904. In 1918, Ganong completed the translation of Volume III of Champlain's Voyages , part of a major publication of Champlain's writings by the Champlain Society. He was also the first to pose
155-457: A place of learning for students of botany and horticulture . By authoring several books including The Teaching Botanist , A Laboratory Manual for Plant Physiology , The Living Plant , and A Textbook of Botany for Colleges , Ganong was able to establish and maintain an international reputation in botany. Under his administration, Smith's Botany department reached a peak in student enrollment, size of staff, and number of courses. He ensured that
186-508: A popular artistic subject since antiquity, both in visual arts and literature. As Renaissance artists turned to classical antiquity for inspiration, artistic references to Arcadia underwent a revival. [1] Images of beautiful nymphs frolicking in lush forests have been a frequent source of inspiration for painters and sculptors. Because of the influence of Virgil in medieval European literature, e. g. in Divine Comedy , Arcadia became
217-621: A series of six articles in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada between 1911 and 1928. In 1889 he presented a paper on the cartography of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence from the 1530s to 1604. Later, in the 1930s, he published an additional nine articles in the Transactions on what he termed the crucial maps in the early cartography and place-nomenclature of the region. The articles were drawn together and published in book form by
248-779: A strong interest in nature. He also showed a talent for languages. Through his life he would come to have at least a working knowledge of French, German, Maliseet and Mi'kmaq . He was an early naturalist and by the age of seventeen, he had first-hand knowledge of numerous rivers and coastal areas of New Brunswick as well as the flora and fauna of the province. His explorations would continue throughout his life, both on his own and with one or more companions including Arthur H. Pierce, Mauran I. Furbish and George Upham Hay. He received education from public school in St. Stephen, while attending his last year of high school in Saint John. Ganong attended
279-643: A symbol of pastoral simplicity. European Renaissance writers (for instance, the Spanish poet Garcilaso de la Vega ) often revisited the theme, and the name came to apply to any idyllic location or paradise. Of particular note is Et in Arcadia Ego by Nicolas Poussin . In 1502 Jacopo Sannazaro published his long poem Arcadia that fixed the Early Modern perception of Arcadia as a lost world of idyllic bliss, remembered in regretful dirges. In
310-427: Is The Arcadians (1909). Pastoral science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction which uses bucolic, rural settings, like other forms of pastoral literature . Since it is a subgenre of science fiction, authors may set stories either on Earth or another habitable planet or moon, sometimes including a terraformed planet or moon. Unlike most genres of science fiction, pastoral science fiction works downplay
341-433: Is often contrasted with the negative aspects of noisy, dirty, fast-paced cities. Some works take a Luddite tone, criticizing mechanization and industrialization and showing the ills of urbanization and over-reliance on advanced technologies. William Francis Ganong William Francis Ganong FRSC (19 February 1864 – 7 September 1941) was a Canadian botanist , historian and cartographer . His botany career
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#1732765527967372-756: The University of New Brunswick where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1884 and his master's degree in 1886. The next year, he went to Boston where in 1887, he received an A.B. from Harvard University . He obtained a doctorate in biology from the University of Munich in 1894 and published two papers in the German language. It was probably at Harvard that he met Jean Murray Carman, sister of his friend and fellow Harvard student, New Brunswick poet Bliss Carman . They married in 1888. The marriage lasted thirty-two years until her death in 1920. They had no children. Ganong remarried on June 20, 1923, with Anna Hobbet,
403-498: The 1580s Sir Philip Sidney circulated copies of his influential heroic romance poem The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia , which established Arcadia as an icon of the Renaissance ; although the story is plentifully supplied with shepherds and other pastoral characters, the primary characters are all royal visitors of the countryside. In 1598 the Spanish playwright and poet Lope de Vega published Arcadia: Prose and Verse , which
434-547: The 17th century Champlain fixed its present orthography, with the 'r' omitted, and Ganong has shown its gradual progress northwards, in a succession of maps, to its resting place in the Atlantic Provinces ". Revival of Mi'kmaq language has provided strong reason to believe that Verrazzano was informed by the name the Mi'kmaq gave to this place. The name Acadie may be derived from the Mi'kmaq, because in their language
465-467: The 1880's: His painting "In Arcadia", which was an "unusual venture into mythology, tackled using the most modern of methods: the camera" and a relief with nearly 20 sculptures, paintings and photographs connected with it. The atmosphere of the relief has been described as "vespertinal mixture of sadness and tranquility", a "sylvan realm far removed from the realities in 1883 Philadelphia". New York magazine critic Mark Stevens wrote "His [Eakins] joy in
496-573: The 3rd century BCE the Greek poet Theocritus wrote idealised views of the lives of peasants in Arcadia for his fellow educated inhabitants of the squalid and disease-ridden city of Alexandria . Greek mythology and the poetry of Theocritus inspired the Roman poet Virgil to write his Eclogues , a series of poems with references to Arcadia as the home of Pan, pipes and singing. Arcadia has remained
527-588: The German painter Wilhelm von Kaulbach produced an etching, named "Faust und Helena in Arkadien". Faust and Helena are shown in the Arcadian grove, at the place of cheerful poetry, where they produced a son, Euphorion. He represent the spirit of antiquity married to the Nordic-German spirit, as an allegory of German-Greek poetry. The American painter Thomas Eakins produced a series of Arcadian works in
558-481: The University of Toronto Press in 1964. His work on place-nomenclature is still widely referenced. In his explorations, he also had a chance to name several geographical features in the largely unexplored central and northern parts of New Brunswick, including Mount Carleton , the highest summit in the province, which he named after the first Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick, Thomas Carleton . Another mountain to
589-471: The figure of the noble savage , both being regarded as living close to nature, uncorrupted by civilization, and virtuous. According to Greek mythology, Arcadia of Peloponnesus was the domain of Pan , a virgin wilderness home to the god of the forest and his court of dryads , nymphs and other spirits of nature. It was one version of paradise , though only in the sense of being the abode of supernatural entities, not an afterlife for deceased mortals. In
620-591: The historical geography of the province. Among his surveys were St. Croix Island , site of Champlain's first settlement in North America in 1604. He acquired a working knowledge of the Maliseet and Mi'kmaq languages, and with that understanding and consultation with linguists and native historians, he undertook an investigation of the aboriginal place names in the Maritime Provinces, publishing
651-463: The name "Arcadia" to the entire North American Atlantic coast north of Virginia . In time, this mutated to Acadia . The Dictionary of Canadian Biography says: "Arcadia, the name Verrazzano gave to Maryland or Virginia 'on account of the beauty of the trees', made its first cartographical appearance in the 1548 Gastaldo map and is the only name on that map to survive in Canadian usage. . . . In
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#1732765527967682-405: The natural body rarely made its way into his major paintings, perhaps because the subject was so personally complex for him. Only in his great " Swimming ", which shows naked young men at a swimming hole, did he create an American Arcadia." Eakins' student Thomas Pollock Anshutz (1851-1912) had a long preoccupation painting "Arcadian subjects". One of the most popular Edwardian musical comedies
713-477: The north of Mount Carleton was named for Ganong in 1901 by his friend and naturalist Mauran Furbish. As a scientist, Ganong brought a special quality to the study of New Brunswick history, which featured an emphasis on map-based studies and in determining the exact location of key historic sites. He actually went to the places he wrote about. As a translator and editor of the 17th-century Acadian narratives of Nicolas Denys and Father Chrétien Le Clercq he became
744-520: The range and quality of equipment available to students was high, and the department was able to attain a positive academic reputation. Enrollment in the introductory elective class peaked at 182 in 1926. Ganong retired from Smith College in 1932. He was elected President of the Botanical Society of America in 1907. Ganong undertook historical work during his teaching career. In summers, he would return to New Brunswick to study and document
775-399: The role of futuristic technologies. The pioneer is author Clifford Simak (1904–1988), a science fiction Grand Master whose output included stories written in the 1950s and 1960s about rural people who have contact with extraterrestrial beings who hide their alien identity. Pastoral science fiction stories typically show a reverence for the land, its life-giving food harvests, the cycle of
806-406: The seasons, and the role of the community. While fertile agrarian environments on Earth or Earth-like planets are common settings, some works may be set in ocean or desert planets or habitable moons. The rural dwellers, such as farmers and small-townspeople, are depicted sympathetically, albeit with the tendency to portray them as conservative and suspicious of change. The simple, peaceful rural life
837-529: The word "cadie" means "place of abundance" and can be found in names such as "Tracadie" and "Shubenacadie". In 1848, Judge Samuel Treat, of St. Louis described life of the early settlers in the Midwest with the sentence "Each family produced whatever was necessary for its own consumption, and lived in almost Arcadian simplicity." Composer W. S. Gilbert used the concept of Arcadia in his musicals Happy Arcadia (1872) and Iolanthe (1882). Around 1880,
868-478: Was a bestseller at the time. Though depicted as contemporary, this pastoral form is often connected with the Golden Age . It may be suggested that its inhabitants have merely continued to live as persons did in the Golden Age, and all other nations have less pleasant lives because they have allowed themselves to depart from original simplicity. The 16th-century Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano applied
899-663: Was a position he would fill for 36 years. He was also director of the Botanic Garden at Smith. Ganong , was responsible for developing the Garden, which had been laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted in 1893. Ganong expanded and revised Olmsted's planting specifications to make the entire campus an arboretum , and they reworked the herbaceous beds as a "systematics garden" after the Engler-Prantl classification system. The outdoor environment at Smith thus became (and remains)
930-504: Was nine years old, his family moved to St. Stephen where his father, along with his uncle, Gilbert Ganong , established the Ganong Brothers candy factory. It was expected that young William would enter the family business when he came of age, but early on, he showed an interest in the natural world. These interests extended to botany, reading, maps, and exploring the countryside. He was encouraged by his grandfather, who also had
961-671: Was spent mainly as a professor at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts . In his private life he contributed to the historical and geographical understanding of his native New Brunswick . William Francis Ganong was born on February 19, 1864, in Saint John , in what was previously Carleton , in pre-confederation New Brunswick , the eldest child of James Harvey Ganong and Susan E. Brittain, both of whom descended from United Empire Loyalists . He had six younger siblings, including Susan , Arthur , Edwin , and Kit . When he