Literary Garden Research Articles

The Garden State: Conceptualizing Nineteenth-century Latin American Environmental Discourse on Nature/Nation's Transformation

Abstract: Imagining Spanish America as Eden and sublime force, colonial environmental aesthetics inaugurated American disponibilité , figuring environment in the colonial matrix of power as the non-place outside of European time and space. The image of the garden evoked by this aesthetics corresponded to the desired, secular transformation of environment, which delimited the location of a colonial vegetal-human relations of extraction. I contend that in the transition period from colony to republic, cultural, political, and scientific discourse used the image and language of the garden to reestablish claims over territory by shifting from the Edenic to georgic mode. I offer the Garden State as a (neo)imperial environmental aesthetic to lay bare the politics and poetics of place-making and its entanglements—through agriculture and horticulture—as part of a response to the rise of liberal agro-economic policy and the proliferation of the plantation model in the work of naturalists, politicians, Neo-classical, and Romantic writers. By placing ecocriticism, environmental history, and plant studies into conversation with garden theory through this framework, I argue we can better attend to the concentric material and literary gardens and garden-like formations tied to plantation logic and the ordered cultivation and civilization of space and human-vegetal relations in Latin America's nineteenth century.

Matka i Syn w "Ogrodzie rozkosznym Miłości Bożej" Adriana Wieszczyckiego

The article examines family relationships shown in the poetic cycle entitled The Delightful Garden of God’s Love by Adrian Wieszczycki. Attention is drawn to the status of the Holy Family, especially to the figures of Mary and Jesus, and their role in the work of salvation was analyzed. It is noticed that the Mother of God and her Son – apart from the strictly human relationship – are connected by a bond that goes beyond the canon of the traditional family, and thus beyond the accepted patterns of behavior and relationships with other people. The author also analyzed the form of poetic expression, i.e., a combination of the following forms: cloister and emblematic, resulting in a very original and intricate construction. The poems have a meditative character, and the composition of the cycle is based on the mysteries of the Rosary that tell the History of Salvation. The poet created a literary garden in which specific flowers bloom: lilies symbolizing the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Virgin Mary and Christ, the Lover and the Beloved; roses referring to the attributes of Mary, the Passion of Christ and royal power; and amaranths, which are a symbol of immortality. The Holy Family is an inspiration and a role model for secular families, and its eternal status is constituted by the presence of angels.

“Plants have a will of their own”: the construction of botanical metaphors and symbols in the literary garden of (postcolonial) India

This article offers a preliminary investigation of figurative, metaphorical and linguistic aspects of the garden in Indian English fiction. After providing a short introduction to the symbolism of gardens in the colonial and postcolonial periods, and to the image of the garden in Anglophone Indian literature, the focus will be on the novel The Solitude of Emperors by David Davidar (2007), in order to stress the relevance of both specific phytonyms and common names of plants as important linguistic, cultural and textual indicators employed to construct and convey meanings, often in the form of cognitive metaphors. In this light, the postcolonial garden emerges as a cultural site of hybridity and connection with the past. The examination is undertaken through an interdisciplinary approach that follows and adapts the theories and methods of postcolonial studies, stylistics and narratology (e.g. Kovecses 2002; Jeffries and McIntyre 2010; Sorlin 2014).

The Approaches from National Literature to World Literature

The paper explores the approaches from national literature to world one. The first approach to the world literature is literary translation and translated literature, the former refers to the faithful translation of original national works, and the latter means a creative treason of translation, or a kind of rewriting, based on the original text; the second is to gain the Nobel Award for Literature; The third is travel, exile or Diaspora of literature; and the last one is literary communication. In the end, the author stresses that the world literature is a literary garden of diversional and different dimension.

TENDING TO ONE'S GARDEN: DESCHAMPS'S 'BALLADE TO CHAUCER' RECONSIDERED

Sometime towards the end of the fourteenth century, the French poet Eustache Deschamps wrote a formes fixes ballade addressed to Geoffrey Chaucer. Somewhat surprisingly, this address appears to be the only known direct acknowledgement of Chaucer's literary activity to have been made within the English poet's own lifetime, and it is famously ambiguous. In the lyric, Deschamps compares Chaucer to multiple venerable figures, such as Socrates, Seneca, and Ovid, as one who has illuminated England. He further commends Chaucer for having translated that Ur-text of French courtly love literature, the Roman de la Rose, 'en bon angles' (line 16: 'into good English') and for planting a literary garden in England that will be full of French plants.1 While Deschamps remains far from the fountain of Helicon in France, Chaucer has the fountain under his 'baillie' (line 23: 'jurisdiction'). That all said, Deschamps declares that he is sending work to Chaucer but does not ask for any of Chaucer's in return, and he famously refers to him in the refrain as 'grant translateur, noble Geoffroi Chaucier'.Where earlier critics had scarcely doubted the sincerity of Deschamps's high valuation of Chaucer, William Calin tempered the enthusiasm by questioning how much this ballade could really be saying about Chaucer's fame on the Continent and Deschamps's interest in English literature.2 Many of Deschamps's other lyrics testify to his strongly anti-English and proto-nationalistic sentiments, such as the ballades in which he paints idealizing futures that see England wiped from the very face of the earth.3 There is also no evidence that Deschamps, in fact, knows more than a few words of English, as observable from his well-known ballade on an encounter with two menacing English soldiers in Calais, in which he mocks their alien-sounding language.4 The insistent refrain within the lyric - 'grant translateur, noble Geffroy Chaucier' - has the ring of praise to it, but it is also potentially dismissive, or, at the very least, vexed. Ardis Butterfield too reads all of Deschamps's compliments to Chaucer as subtly backhanded. Thus Deschamps's portrayal of the fountain of Helicon as being in Chaucer's 'baillie' recalls for her, in its legalistic use of the term, the English siege and subsequent occupation of Calais in 1346 and the destructive pillaging of its surrounding region by the troops of the Black Prince in the decades to come.5 For John Bowers, the whole ballade is an 'exercise in hyperbole' and a 'subtle effort in demeaning Chaucer's enterprise as the mere importation of the French Rose for an English garden'.6 The ballade generally tends to be read in the context of Deschamps's anti-English political sentiments. Indeed, scholars seeking to date the ballade have favoured periods of peace or of less strained political conditions between England and France as the most suitable possibilities.7As this piece argues, however, Deschamps's 'Ballade to Chaucer' is about far more than Deschamps's degree of familiarity with Chaucer's work. Rather, this ballade sheds light on a significant feature of late medieval Anglo-French translation practice that has heretofore received comparatively less attention. Scholarly discussions of Anglo-French literary exchange have tended to focus on issues surrounding language, linguistic difference being clearly a fundamental feature of translation activity.8 Yet, as I aim to show, Anglo-French literary exchange was also heavily concerned with policing the transmission of literary form and of literary tropes, with a special interest in the transmission of references to classical antiquity. While synchronic translation between contemporary languages and literatures was, necessarily, a dominant feature of Anglo-French literary exchange, the diachronic translation of antiquity became an important yardstick for evaluating a cross-Channel poet's literary achievements, particularly within the tense geopolitical climate created by the Hundred Years War. …

Literary Flowers

This article introduces an interdisciplinary service project performed with undergraduate literature students at the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho. The project, Literary Flowers, was modeled after New York City's Library Way and challenged students to plant a “literary garden” of formative voices. Further, it encouraged students to consider cultural translatability: how texts—some centuries old—fit into their final narratives today. This article provides a detailed description of the project, a consideration of its place among similar service projects, and examples of student work and response.

Humanities

Humanities

Erotic Enclaves and Contested Beds: Gardens in Pu Songling’s Chuanqi Tales

Abstract: This article examines the literary garden depicted by Pu Songling (1640-1715) in his Liaozhai zhiyi 聊齋誌異 (Liaozhai's records of the strange; 1766). These enchanted, deserted, and haunted gardens function as metaphors for the contested ground on which some key Ming-Qing intellectual issues are debated. The article examines Pu’s depiction of qing 情,an important concept reflecting the philosophical and literary trends of the time, and shows that in the process of constructing literary gardens, Pu challenges the intellectual issues of his time and dissolves the boundaries between normal and abnormal, reality and ideal, death and life, and order and disorder.

Houellebecq and the Novel as Site of Epistemic Rebellion

Michel Houellebecq is a writer who cultivates an incongruous literary garden, where the necessity of describing contemporary objects as equipment for the manufacture of individuals can be said to precede his concern for literary conventions. This has been at the centre of much criticism formulated around Houellebecq’s novels. One book in particular by Eric Naulleau called Au Secour, Houellebecq Revient! attacks his novels on the grounds that their success relies on his charming the reader by using recognisable elements of everyday life and incorporating them in the novels, in such a way that they could no longer be distinguished from the world of everyday life.

Arcadia as Utopia in Contemporary Landscape Design: The Work of Bernard Lassus

This article considers the concept of the utopia from the point of view of garden design. It begins with an evocation of the `Jardin de Julie', the literary garden described in Rousseau and acutely analysed by Louis Marin. It then passes to a series of actual gardens created by the French contemporary designer Bernard Lassus, in which the use of landscape effects is seen as achieving similar dislocations of space and incitements to the imagination.

Aesthetics and representation

As we have seen, Crescenzi does not refer directly to literary garden tropes, and yet a closer examination of his text has shown that the pleasure gardens he describes have much in common with them. Similarly, when he describes the gardens and their effect on those who enter them, Crescenzi does not employ a vocabulary one would necessarily classify as aesthetic. This is not surprising, since the aesthetic language to which we are accustomed had yet to be codified. It was not until after the Renaissance, when a distinction came to be made between the fine arts and the mechanical arts, that such an aesthetic language was developed.98 An aesthetic attitude not only requires the conception of fine art, however, it also requires a disinterested appreciation of art that does not account for function and meaning, as outlined by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Judgment. In the Middle Ages, aesthetic writing was not of the disinterested variety we have come to associate with the modern definition of the word. It was buried in polemical texts warning against the dangerous allure of art,99 while other examples are found in theological writings.100 An aesthetic attitude can also be found in such practical texts as Crescenzi's, especially when they concern the interconnectedness of sensory perception and mental and physical health.

Cultivating the Gardens of Golden Age Children's Literature

Cultivating the Gardens of Golden Age Children's Literature Joel D. Chaston "Is there really anything new I can say about children's books of the 'Golden Age'?" This was the question voiced by a graduate student in a seminar I recently taught in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century children's books. The student had made a trip to our university's library and discovered that there were already hundreds of published articles dealing with such works as Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868-69), Francis Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (1911), and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). While I reassured the student that there are certainly "new" things to say about these books, I flashed back to a letter I received the first time I submitted an article to this very journal. At that time, an outside reader suggested that I might want to write on something other than Alice's Adventures in Wonderland because so much has already been said about it. Click for larger view View full resolution Painting the Roses Red from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, illus. John Tenniel During the rest of that semester, the student I mentioned, along with others in the seminar, tilled the gardens of Golden Age children's literature, occasionally discovering that—like Burnett's Mary Lennox and Carroll's Alice—an apparently overgrown, dead garden might yield beautiful flowers. Or that paradisiacal gardens might really contain white roses painted red or tiger lilies that talk back. Not surprisingly, much of what we found in these gardens was not original and, more often than not, we discovered that other critics had previously voiced our apparently novel ideas. Still, three students in that seminar (Susan Stewart, Angelia Blair, and David Morgan) went on to write innovative theses that germinated from the literary gardens we nurtured. In the past few years, many scholars in our field have indeed proved that there is still much left to be said about Golden Age children's texts. As I am writing this introduction, I have just finished reading Jack Zipes's insightful discussion of Heinrich Hoffman's Der Stuwwelpeter (1845) in his new book, Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children's Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter (Routledge, 2001), and I have recently perused Martin Gardner's newly revised Annotated Alice (Norton, 2000), Michael Patrick Hearn's Annotated Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Norton, 2000), and Janice M. Alberghene and Beverly Lyon Clark's Little Women and the Feminist Imagination (Garland, 1999). Waiting in the wings are many of the scholarly works recently reviewed in the Quarterly, including U. C. Knoepflmacher's Ventures into Chilldhood: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity (U of Chicago, 1998). The five critical articles in this special issue of the Quarterly, which is devoted to children's literature of the [End Page 2] "Golden Age," are certainly additional evidence that it is still worth unlocking the gates of well-known Golden Age literary gardens, demonstrating that a garden may look different on closer inspection than it does viewed from the tiny door at the bottom of a rabbit hole. Each of the articles included, selected from many fine submissions, reiterates Alison Lurie's contention in Don't Tell The Grown-ups (Little, Brown 1990) that many of the well-known children's texts of the Golden Age are subversive. In addition, these articles turn inside out certain preconceptions about classic children's texts, including, coincidentally, three that my graduate students had studied. The first article, Danielle Price's "Cultivating Mary: The Victorian Secret Garden," is an insightful rereading of Burnett's The Secret Garden, focusing on issues of gender, class, and imperialism and drawing on the work of nine-teenth-century theorists about gardening. Price argues that the "cultivation" of Mary Lennox follows nineteenth-century ideas about creating perfect gardens, and Mary learns to provide beauty and comfort, in turn cultivating her male cousin and furthering male power. In "'Why is a Raven like a Writing-Desk?': The Play of Letters in Lewis Carroll's Alice Books," Jan Susina reexamines Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking...

Ornamental structures in the medieval gardens of Scotland

This article examines evidence for the existence of ornamental structures within gardens belonging to the aristocracy of medieval Scotland. To complement this study it also evaluates evidence for closely related structures, such as those set within castle courtyards and hunting parks. Like garden buildings, these were relatively small in scale and apparently designed with as much, if not more, concern for their aesthetic as their practical value. In this connection, the form, sources and iconography of the surviving fountain at Linlithgow Palace are closely assessed, and it is suggested that this sophisticated work of architecture must have consolidated and further inspired a tradition for creating ornamental buildings within the garden (and indeed the parks and courtyards) of Scotland's finest homes. LITERARY GARDENS The study of gardens and their architecture during the medieval and Early Modern periods in Scotland suffers, as do so many other areas of the country's cultural history, from the scarceness of primary source material.1 From the evidence of contemporary poetry, however, there can be little doubt that ornamental gardens played a significant role in the lives of Scotland's courtiers and kings. The events of William Dunbar's early 16th-century allegorical poem, The Golden Targe, take place within a 'park of most plesere' that is replete with 'flouris faire';2 in the Thrissil and the Rois, Dunbar's narrator 'enterit in a lusty gairding gent [beautiful] . . . most dulce and redolent / Off herb and flour and tendir plantis sueit, / And grene levis doing of dew doun fleit',3 and in The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, the poet recounts a visit to 'ane gudlie grein garth, full of gay flouris, / Hegeit, of ane huge hicht, with hawthorne treis' where he happens upon 'thre gay ladeis sit in ane grene arbeir, / All grathit in to garlandis of fresche gudlie flouris.'4 Equally vivid are the descriptions penned by Dunbar's contemporary, Gavin Douglas, whose Palice of Honour begins with the poet walking at dawn through a garden in which

Plato's literary garden: how to read a Platonic dialogue

This work is designed for students who are undertaking the serious study of Plato for the first time. The author aims to provide a method for students to engage with the dialogues as actively as the actual participants are engaged, and to offer scholars an account of the significance of the dramatic and literary form of the dialogues.

Nature in the city: Horace Cleveland's aesthetic

Horace Cleveland, a Nineteenth Century landscape architect, conceived of the city as a work of art. The development of Cleveland's aesthetic can be traced directly to ideas about the American landscape that were explored in significant works of American literature. Cleveland was influenced by the writing of Washington Irving, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The communicative potential of the landscape as presented in Irving's writing influenced Cleveland's thinking as he considered the affective potential of designed landscapes. The writing of Longfellow and Emerson influenced Cleveland's ideas about his social responsibility as an artist in the landscape. Cleveland was also influenced by Emerson's aesthetic theories that maintained that the artist in the landscape should be true to the place in which he worked. Those ideas about the landscape and landscape design were first tested by Cleveland (with his partner Robert Morris Copeland) in the design of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Emerson's burial place in Concord, MA. By the 1870s Cleveland decided that his calling was in the west. He first moved to Chicago, but the greatest success of his career came with the design of the Minneapolis Park System, a design that was in keeping with the aesthetic principles that he gleaned from American literature. Cleveland's last important work was Minnehaha Falls in Minneapolis—an important literary garden owing to the connection with Longfellow's ‘This Song off Hiawatha’—whiich added the final link to the Minneapolis Park System.

The Doctrine of Charity in Mediaeval Literary Gardens: A Topical Approach through Symbolism and Allegory

The Doctrine of Charity in Mediaeval Literary Gardens: A Topical Approach through Symbolism and Allegory