Garden Imagery Research Articles

Chinese-English Translation of Garden Imagery in Tourist Attraction Descriptions from the Perspective of “Three Beauties Theory”: A Case Study of Lotus Garden in Huzhou

This paper examines the translation of garden imagery in the introduction texts of Huzhou Lotus Garden from the perspective of the “Three Beauties Theory”. It categorizes the imagery and identifies issues such as cultural loss, style deviations, terminology inconsistencies, and the neglect of target cultures. Proposed are tailored translation techniques that align with the beauties of sense, sound, and form, aiming to enhance text quality and the reading experiences of tourists. This study refines the translation of tourist attractions and inspires cross-cultural communication.

Love, Marriage, and a Delayed Harvest: Isaiah 61 as the Reversal of the Song of the Vineyard (5:1–7)

Abstract In the book of Isaiah, the “Song of the Vineyard” (5:1–7) merges garden imagery and love-song language together in a distinctive way. In Isa 61, garden imagery and marital language appear side by side, and the concluding hymn (vv. 10–11) sets the two images in explicit parallel. I argue that the imagery in Isa 61 is a reversing echo of the imagery of Isa 5:1–7 and communicates a message of restoration in keeping with the rest of Isa 60–62. By reversing the imagery of Isa 5:1–7, the author of Isa 61 depicts the fulfillment of the hopes that horticultural and relational destruction will not be the end of the story of God’s people. Recognizing that Isa 61 contains an intentional echo of Isa 5:1–7 lends support to compositional models for Isaiah that view the authorship of the final section(s) of the book as being a conscious development of an existing Isaianic corpus.

“All in a Garden Green”: Shakespeare's Staging of Garden Imagery

This essay draws attention to the surprising lack of scholarship on the staging of garden scenes in Shakespeare's oeuvre. In particular, it explores how garden scenes promote collaborative acts of audience agency and present new renditions of the familiar early modern contrast between the public and the private. Too often the mention of Shakespeare's gardens calls to mind literal rather than literary interpretations: the work of garden enthusiasts like Henry Ellacombe, Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, and Caroline Spurgeon, who present their copious gatherings of plant and flower references as proof that Shakespeare was a garden lover, or the many “Shakespeare Gardens” around the world, bringing to life such lists of plant references. This essay instead seeks to locate Shakespeare's garden imagery within a literary tradition more complex than these literalizations of Shakespeare's “flowers” would suggest. To stage a garden during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries signified much more than a personal affinity for the green world; it served as a way of engaging time-honored literary comparisons between poetic forms, methods of audience interaction, and types of media. Through its metaphoric evocation of the commonplace tradition, in which flowers double as textual cuttings to be picked, revised, judged, and displayed, the staged garden offered a way to dramatize the tensions produced by creative practices involving collaborative composition and audience agency.

Утопия и селекция в романе В. Вульф «Миссис Дэллоуэй»

Olga A. Dzhumaylo. (Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russian Federation). The paper develops the author’s interpretation of the garden imagery in the novel Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, which was suggested before. Apart from antique and biblical allusions found in fictional representation of London Regent’s Park, where characters of the novel find themselves, there should be also distinguished two up-to-date intellectual contexts. The first one is connected with the discussions of 1910-1920 on selection and eugenics and demonstrates fragility of ‘Self’ of fictional Septimus Smith (and in a similar way of Woolf herself), who appears to be ‘an unhealthy garden species’. The second one brings forth antiwar context of the novel, considering Septimus as a war veteran suffering from shell-shock and representing the whole generation of a broken young men (tree imagery), whose misfortune was the effect of the work of ‘state gardeners’ (a cabinet imagery in the novel). Key words: Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, utopia, selection, eugenics, garden, Regent’s Park .

Garden Hybrids

This article discusses representations of hermaphrodites in the domestic context of Roman gardens and argues that the spatial context of the hermaphrodite body is as germane to critical understanding as the intersexed body itself. The spatial and semantic interrelations between Roman gardens and hermaphrodite images focus on the dynamics of viewing hermaphrodite types in Italo-Roman art (section 1), the spatial configuration of hermaphrodites with documented findspots (section 2), Ovid's introduction of garden imagery in the tale of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (Met. 4. 285–388) compared to the Salmakis inscription from Kaplan Kalesi at Halicarnassus (section 3), and the historical correlation to Augustan Rome's vegetative symbolism (section 4). This synthesis of material, literary, and historical evidence for hermaphrodite images indicates that their representation in Roman domestic art can be read as an expression of domestic harmony that mirrored the emphasis on heterosexual union and political concord ushered in by Augustus and Livia.

Fancy, Dreams, and Paradise: Miltonic and Baconian Garden Imagery in Coleridge’s Kubla Khan

This article challenges conventional readings of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan that interpret the poem as presenting an ideal model of poetic creativity. In locating the intertextual web of references that point to Milton’s Paradise Lost and various texts by Francis Bacon, the garden imagery of the poem, which has been so resistant to critical interpretation, can be read in the context of a rejection of Coleridge’s own empirically grounded theory of inspiration expressed in his 1796 volume of poems. A Coleridgean theory of dreams is presented as a framework by which the prose Preface to Kubla Khan can be shown to reveal the poet’s criticism of the dream-language by which the poem was purportedly constructed. The Preface affixed to the 1816 version of Kubla Khan will be subject to critical reassessment, in order to understand the circumstances surrounding its publication history. The major contention of this article is that Kubla Khan is a revision and rejection of Fancy, the poetic form of inspiration, material in its operations, and conceived as the agency by which Coleridge’s early poetry was produced.

The Poet as Translator: Mary Wortley Montagu Approaches the Turkish Lyric

The Poet as Translator: Mary Wortley Montagu Approaches the Turkish Lyric

Enclosure Polemics and the Garden in the 1650s

Through close readings of husbandry manuals, religious pamphlets, and Paradise Lost , this essay explores how polemicists on both sides of the enclosure debate made strategic use of garden imagery in their writing. The argument shows that Puritan improvers at midcentury, by figuring enclosed commons as idealized gardens and England as a new Eden, invent a distinctly georgic—and distinctly English—vision of paradise. Turning to the appropriation of garden imagery by enclosure opponents, the essay juxtaposes Gerrard Winstanley and John Milton, both of whom privilege the paradise within over any imaginable earthly garden.

Postcolonial "Greenery": Surreal Garden Imagery in Nuruddin Farah's Maps

To date a variety of cultural and literary scholars have questioned the intersection of ecocriticism and postcolonial studies with varying results. Anthony Vital recently advanced “a specifically South African ecocriticism” in his published scholarship on the novels of J. M. Coetzee (“Situating Ecology in Recent South African Fiction” 299); Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin edited a special issue of Interventions devoted to the topic; and William Slaymaker opines his concerns for the implications of this combination, especially in the African continent. Yet despite the attention, this fruitful topic remains largely unattended. A discourse between ecocriticism and postcolonial criticism can aid scholars on either side immensely with contemporary critical subjects. One fertile case study resides with Nuruddin Farah's novel Maps, which experimentally narrates a young boy's journeys during the Ogaden War between Somalia and Ethiopia. Farah intentionally employs several accounts of intense garden imagery, both in dreams and in reality, and associates these accounts with the conflicts his protagonist encounters. Through an intense analysis of this garden imagery fueled by the union of ecocritical and postcolonial discourses, Farah's allegorical modeling of the Somali nation on these garden images may emerge, allowing the reader to recognize his writing and his message. Not only will a greater appreciation of Maps better instruct Farah's readers, but the methods to achieve it will also add further credentials to the rich discourse possible when these separate critical idioms are combined.

Hallowed Ground: Landscape as Hagiography in Willa Cather'sDeath Comes for the Archbishop

Two fleeting glimpses of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range in Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop have eluded the critical attention of scholars. The first of these two epiphanies appears three-quarters of the way into the narrative, so we too will proceed to this revelation as though traipsing on mules with Cather during one of her pivotal visits to the Southwest. To begin, we will consider why the land is central to the novel's meaning and see how the text's mood is determined by the desert landscape. To appreciate Cather's art is to understand the sanctified nature of the land, which illuminates our own nature at the same time. The novel presents sangre de Cristo as a fact, as the ubiquitous undercurrent of existence. The land, like our nature, may have fallen, yet it has not been conquered but redeemed. The critical range of relevant scholarship encompasses both secular and religious readings, even secularized religious readings. Many critics argue that Cather's vision is purely secular, with origins and finality in the material realm. Sally Peltier Harvey identifies Cather's use of distinctive garden imagery in Death Comes for the Archbishop as symbolic of a healthy community, yet Harvey mentions this symbol only to supplement her sociopolitical reading of the novel as a text that shows how to establish a happy balance between personal and public needs. It redefines self-fulfillment in terms of service to and identification with community (101). her definition of self-fulfillment--the American Dream--Harvey uses the land as a symbol but omits reference to visions of a landscape imbued with sanctity, and consequently she fails to integrate the landscape into her model of a viable community. For Harvey the land is not spiritually transcendent but a humanist's symbol--the color of vibrant cultural identity--or epic stage for a questing hero. Other critics ask religious questions and find secular answers. After Eden: The of American Space in the Fiction of Willa Cather and Theodore Dreiser, Conrad Eugene Ostwalt, Jr. analyzes how the influx of ideas from Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and G. W. F. Hegel, among others, shaped American culture as it entered the twentieth century. Once promising face-to-face encounters with the divine, America, like Eden, had fallen from grace, shifting from sacred to secular, and thus faced the need to redefine its spatial orientation to all that was lost: relationship with the land, relationship with the divine. Ostwalt argues that in Cather's fiction the frontier embodied otherness. Once this other was apprehended, it lost its ability to disclose the transcendent and sacred (49). When America became industrialized, the New World became profane: Secularization of American natural space occurs when characters attempt to reduce the otherness of nature and to control the natural world (55). place of a religious other, Ostwalt continues, the land in Cather's fiction embodies divine attributes of mystery, awesome power, beneficence, and ample providence that make human relationships possible. Depleted of transcendence, the land provides a forum for community. What became of religion? In Cather's secular world, human relationships replace what one loses from the destruction of the sacred environment, namely a relationship with deity (74). Other people substitute for divine otherness. Critics like Harvey and Ostwalt find Cather's religion--a relinking with a divine other--in human community. The land is merely the forum. contrast to Ostwalt's view of a desacralized earth, this essay will argue that the land in Cather's novel, by virtue of creation, is sacred and could no more be profaned than it could lose its properties as earth or the Southwest its distinctively red tint. Previous analyses have shortchanged the novel by over-looking one essential, indestructible component--sangre de Cristo. Death Comes for the Archbishop presents the land as having an irrevocable, redemptive quality: instated at creation, tainted by Eden's die/dye, restained by sangre de Cristo, and sealed by the cross. …

Virtue, Gender, and the Authentic Self in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Richardson, Rousseau, and Laclos (review)

502 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 11:4 is that we can understand epistolary exchanges in Clarissa in terms of the cardiac metaphor: "a circulatory system ofreceiving, expressing, and receiving again those impressions and ideas closest to the hearts of the individual correspondents " (p. 188). He is informative when he reminds us that in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century "the representation of the heart takes on new and more positive meaning as the source of circulatory power, vital equilibrium, and a variety of expressions of love" (p. 198). And he is excellent on Lovelace's phallic heart, a displacement upwards that threatens often enough to choke him so that in some sense he rapes himself as well as Clarissa. But Erickson's master metaphor in this chapter tends to become more and more literal, and Clarissa is depicted as a sort of heart surgeon, operating on herself to render her heart to others. Erickson also becomes more and more densely theological, as the dying Clarissa fortifies and restores her heart (as a new Eve and Mary, "the woman writer who bears a new female version of the Word," p. 216). In the end, Erickson's reading of Clarissa is powerful and suggestive, almost overwhelming in its command of the language of the heart, but his rendering of Richardson's novel strikes me as theologically and historically overdetermined, extracting a density of moralreligious meaning that actual eighteenth-century readers might well have been astonished to read about. In the process, Erickson tends to efface the moral, social , and in particular the historical world the novel represents and to favour, I think excessively, the anatomical and moral-theological. John Richetti University of Pennsylvania Christine Roulston. Virtue, Gender, and the Authentic Self in EighteenthCentury Fiction: Richardson, Rousseau, and Laclos. Gainesville: University Press ofFlorida, 1998. xx + 21 1pp. US$49.95. ISBN 0-8130-15812 . Long, long ago, in terms of critical half-life, Nancy Miller ended her book The Heroine's Text (1980) with these lines: "Because the novel, more than any other form ofart, is forced by the contract ofthe genre to negotiate with social realities in order to remain legible, its plots are largely overdetermined by the commonplaces of the culture. Until the culture invents new plots for women, we will continue to read the heroine's text. Or we could stop reading novels" (pp. 157-58). Her last words have begun to take on a new meaning in the last twenty years. I think she meant at the time that we could "stop reading novels" if we were tired of witnessing the same euphoric and dysphoric plots repeated over and over again. But, as later critics have continued to explore eighteenth-century novels and the "social realities" that determine their trajectory, we seem to be producing "readings" of those novels that are more and more alike. REVIEWS 503 I say this with some sorrow, since Christine Roulston's book is full ofintelligent close readings of the four novels she has chosen: Pamela, Clarissa, La Nouvelle Héloïse, and Les Liaisons dangereuses (all novels that Miller included as well). I particularly enjoyed her discussion oftheparallels with the biblical Dinah narrative in Clarissa and ofthe complex garden imagery in La Nouvelle Héloïse. But overall her ideas about the novels and their relationship to each other produce a strong déjà lu effect. Perhaps this is because there seems to have been a long gap between the writing of the book and its publication. There are very few references to critical work from the 1990s in her bibliography and none after 1994. For example, she refers to Habbakuk's 1950 article on eighteenth-century family law but not to Susan Staves's work; to Peter Brooks's The Novel ofWorldliness (1969), but not to Susan Winnett's Terrible Sociability (1993), which significantly extends and modifies Brooks's insights. This also means that she has not been able to take account of more innovative work that has come out recently—Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook's Epistolary Bodies (1996) or Sonia Hofkosh's Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author (1998), for example—books that approach the problem ofwomen in fiction from new vantagepoints...

Nicole Warren Diver and Alabama Beggs Knight: Women on the Threshold of Freedom

Nicole Warren Diver and Alabama Beggs Knight:Women on the Threshold of Freedom Sarah Beebe Fryer (bio) Despite Scott Fitzgerald's heated allegations that his wife Zelda had stolen his material for Tender Is the Night when she wrote and published Save Me the Waltz, her 1932 autobiographical novel, Fitzgerald scholars have generally failed to examine the similarities and differences between the two books. Although the situations and characters of Save Me the Waltz and Tender Is the Night are, in some ways, quite similar, the story each conveys is distinct. Critical examination of the two novels is most enlightening when they are viewed as a pair of perspectives on American womanhood in a decade of momentous change. Zelda Fitzgerald wrote the entire manuscript of Save Me the Waltz, her only novel, during six weeks in 1932 while she was a patient in a mental hospital; Scott had already been working for seven years on the novel that was eventually to become Tender Is the Night.1 Although Scott managed to impose numerous revisions on Zelda's book before its publication,2 his rage over what he perceived as her infringement on his rights to the literary expression of their common experiences lingered. In 1933, during a conversation between the Fitzgeralds in the presence of Zelda's psychiatrist, Scott accused Zelda of "broaching at all times on [his] material" and stubbornly insisted that Zelda make "an unconditional surrender" to him, relinquishing her "idea of writing anything" in the interest of his career (Bruccoli, Some Sort 349-352). Fitzgerald need not have been so upset. With the exception of Henry Dan Piper, who devotes a chapter of his critical biography of Scott Fitzgerald to Zelda's novel—noting that "Save Me the Waltz offers a more sensitive account of the deranged wife's view of her marriage than we find in her husband's version, Tender Is the Night" (204)—few of Scott Fitzgerald's critics examine Zelda's novel in any depth. But the feminist movement has given rise to a flurry of critical activity focusing on women's forgotten writings, and Save Me the Waltz, with its uncommon distinction of viewing from a woman's perspective events and characters made famous by a male author, has recently received considerable attention.3 [End Page 318] Perhaps partly because Save Me the Waltz is a woman's creation, critics are inclined to view it from a feminine perspective—sympathizing with Alabama, resenting David. Similarly, Tender Is the Night, a man's creation, generally evokes sympathy for Dick Diver and distrust—if not outright hostility—toward Nicole. Although Coleman broke new ground in his 1971 article about Tender Is the Night by declaring that Nicole and her sister Baby are "innocent victims of their environment" (38-39), later critics have continued to view Nicole without compassion, berating her for her "emptiness" (Prigozy 214) and for her "materialism" (Grieff 63). Save Me the Waltz and Tender Is the Night both focus on the late 1920s, when attitudes toward women and their traditional roles were undergoing rapid change. Zelda Fitzgerald was receptive to the changes that would eventually allow women to pursue work that interested them; Scott, who wanted much of his insensitivity toward Zelda pardoned on the basis of his efforts to support her financially, clearly accepted the traditional values of Western culture. Both Save Me the Waltz and Tender Is the Night trace a changing marital relationship between a man who has achieved outstanding early success in his chosen career (David Knight as a painter; Dick Diver as a psychiatrist) and a woman who is growing tired of living in her husband's shadow. Both focus on American citizens living on the Riviera, and both are rich with garden imagery. In both books the husband's emotional and intellectual neglect of his wife contributes to her infidelity. Moreover, both novels contain the death of a father, and the deaths affect the adult children in similar ways: Dick is aware that "the earliest and strongest of protections is gone" (203) following the death of his father in the middle of Tender Is the Night; and Alabama, who leaves her own hospital bed to...