Novel Cultivations (eBook)

Plants in British Literature of the Global Nineteenth Century

Elizabeth Hope Chang (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2019
240 Seiten
University of Virginia Press (Verlag)
978-0-8139-4249-0 (ISBN)

Infos

Shortlisted for the Best Book Prize from the British Society of Literature and ScienceNineteenth-century English nature was a place of experimentation, exoticism, and transgression, as site and emblem of the global exchanges of the British Empire. Popular attitudes toward the transplantation of exotic species-botanical and human-to Victorian greenhouses and cities found anxious expression in a number of fanciful genre texts, including mysteries, science fiction, and horror stories.Situated in a mid-Victorian moment of frenetic plant collecting from the far reaches of the British empire, Novel Cultivations recognizes plants as vital and sentient subjects that serve-often more so than people-as actors and narrative engines in the nineteenth-century novel. Conceptions of native and natural were decoupled by the revelation that nature was globally sourced, a disruption displayed in the plots of gardens as in those of novels.Elizabeth Chang examines here the agency asserted by plants with shrewd readings of a range of fictional works, from monstrous rhododendrons in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and Mexican prickly pears in Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm, to Algernon Blackwood's hair-raising "e;The Man Whom the Trees Loved"e; and other obscure ecogothic tales. This provocative contribution to ecocriticism shows plants as buttonholes between fiction and reality, registering changes of form and content in both realms.

Autor

lt;p>Elizabeth Hope Chang is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri and the author of Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 12.4.2019
• Reihe/Serie: Under the Sign of Nature
• Reihe/Serie: Under the Sign of Nature
• Reihe/Serie: Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism
• Verlagsort: Charlottesville
• Sprache: englisch
• Maße: 150 x 150 mm
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Natur / Technik ► Natur / Ökologie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Schlagworte: Environment • exotics • Genre • Gothic • The Adventure of the Naval Treaty • The Moonstone • The Picture of Dorian Gray • Victorian detective fiction • Villette
• ISBN-10: 0-8139-4249-7 / 0813942497
• ISBN-13: 978-0-8139-4249-0 / 9780813942490