Few readers will object to the general arc of K.’s study. His engagement with issues such as the multivocal nature of the Eclogues, their perpetuation of ambiguities, and how the poems explore the cognitive and artistic limits of the singers treads upon familiar enough ground. But K.’s approach, emphasising Virgil's creation of a fictional world that demands the reader's imaginative participation, is novel and yields sensitive and rewarding readings that stand out for their attention to aesthetics and the pleasure a reading of the Eclogues generates.

K. is a generous critic who does not quickly dismiss the value of allegorical or historicist approaches to the Eclogues. But he prioritises aesthetics, and his working premise is to understand Virgil's accomplishment in the collection as having created a coherent, fictional world. The presence of historical details and individuals makes the question of what is real or fictional clearly of fundamental importance to the poetry book. In the first chapter, within the framework of works such as Theocritus’ Idylls and the Lament for Bion, and modern critics such as W. Iser and T. Pavel, K. sets forth his approach. Previous studies, he observes, have often set the difficult goal of trying to demarcate the line between reality and fiction. But representations of individuals such as Gallus, for example, or even of poetry itself, are just that, and not straightforward references to reality. K. rather advocates that the reader remain within the fictional world and abandon attempts to distinguish between reality and fiction, between figural and authorial discourse. Indeed, Virgil's text, upon close reading, prompts such a reaction and the result, K. admits, is a complex, expansive and often inconsistent fictional world. But here the imaginative and cooperative reader intervenes, confronting the ambiguities and mysteries of the text, filling out the incomplete gaps and thereby experiencing the pleasure of reading the Eclogues.

K. provides a more sustained demonstration of this approach in the second chapter, and not surprisingly poems 1 and 9, where contemporary reality appears to make its most pronounced entrance, are the focus of discussion. For both poems K. constructs an in-world reading, illustrating how a fictional world can exist without the need to import meaning from outside of the poems. The exchange between Tityrus and Meliboeus in 1, for instance, prompts questions for the reader about the status of the singers, their pasts and futures, for which the reader creates imaginative responses. K. does not depend on references to external reality – such as the confiscations of the triumviral period – to generate meaning, but rather argues that the fictional world created in the poem manages to depict a world structured upon such themes as competition and cooperation, and the powers of the singers and their limitations. K.’s analysis of Eclogue 9 similarly reveals how references to external reality (such as the star of Caesar), rather than fixing meaning, in fact work to create even more ambiguities, and thereby create space in which the autonomous, fictional world can exist.

In Chapter 3 K. focuses on the author. In one of his most rewarding discussions, K. demonstrates how difficult it is to fix or pin down Virgil as author in the collection. Borrowing terminology from U. Eco, K. reveals the significant slippage in the Eclogues between the empirical author, model author and narrator. Eclogue 4, for instance, with its authorial proem and reference to contemporary events, appears to present the reader with a historically locatable author. But as the reader proceeds through the poem this identification becomes destabilised. The speaker's ambition and his competitive instinct to distinguish himself from other poets, for instance, actually integrates him within the fictional world of Virgilian pastoral singers, and therefore blurs the distinction between real and fictional. K. traces similar dynamics of authorial representation in the presentation of Menalcas in poem 5 and Tityrus in 6. Therefore, throughout the collection, questions about authorship abound, and the text itself essentially disavows its own author. For the reader, working through all this can be confusing and contributes to the strangeness of the Eclogues. But the reader's attempts to reconstruct the author, although all the strands cannot be entirely disentangled, is another way in which the reader derives enjoyment.

In Chapter 4 K. further interrogates the role of the reader with an examination of the collection's portrayal of speech and song. His discussion of poems 1 and 7 emphasises the difficulties inherent in the reader's attempts to distinguish between what is to be envisioned as having been performed extemporaneously or retold, for instance, or spoken or sung, and the problems associated with the use of the hexameter to depict all forms of communication. The reader's efforts to determine the boundaries between these various categories creates further ambiguities, the resulting gaps of which must be filled by imaginative effort. The chapter closes with an investigation of love, with particular attention on Gallus and poem 10. Gallus is a great test case for examining the questions of fiction and reality since, as K. observes, he is both a figure from external reality, but can also, in his experiences with love and the power of song in the poem, be compared to characters such as Damon and Corydon and thus integrated into the fictional pastoral world. K. closes with a persuasive reading of the poems Gallus carves onto trees as a way of understanding how the text and the fictional world Virgil creates are not coterminous. Just as Gallus’ poetry will continue to grow, readers will continue to engage with Virgil's world after the poetry book ends. And as happens throughout the collection – whether it be what happens to Meliboeus or Corydon – we will continue to ponder the circumstances of the herdsmen, thereby ensuring that Virgil's text resists closure.

There is a lot to like in K.’s book. He tackles several of the defining features of the Eclogues, and while some of his conclusions about the results of Virgil's creation of a fictional world do not represent a radical departure from current scholarship, he excels in demonstrating how the mechanics of Virgil's text have produced many of these reactions. Indeed, his perceptive readings, particularly with regard to how questions about what is real so often lead us back into the fiction of the pastoral world, underscore how complicated the issues of fiction and reality are for our understanding of the collection and their portrayal of the author and his poetry. A further important, and refreshing, contribution of K.’s study is his attention to aesthetics and pleasure. These values are hard to qualify, and the discussion does at times seem incomplete, but the attempt to engage this often ignored aspect of the Eclogues, and indeed Virgilian poetry, deserves credit. For a study that relies so heavily on the role of the reader and imaginative reconstruction, however, the surprisingly little attention paid to the reader causes some hesitation. K. rarely addresses what reader he envisions. How is his reader historically situated? How might the aesthetics K. discusses change for a first-century versus a twenty-first-century reader? He is clearly not unaware of these issues, but they deserve greater consideration given their importance to his approach. Reader-response criticism has much to offer, but this is too often a failing in its implementation. K.’s book, however, definitely rewards its reader, and as such is a successful and welcome addition to recent studies of the Eclogues.