Secret Gardens Research Articles

Exploring the secret gardens of the city: An assessment of human-nature interactions on informal green space using citizen science data

As urbanization progresses globally, there is a growing concern regarding the diminishing connection between humans and nature. Informal green spaces (IGS) have been identified as a potential solution to this, offering unscripted opportunities for urban residents to engage with nature in a way that is not possible in formally planned parks and gardens. Despite an increasing focus on IGS, we are still developing our understanding of the extent to which people use these spaces to interact with nature. Our work addresses this research gap by employing a spatial analysis method to map IGS within Greater Melbourne, Australia. We used citizen science data to analyse the location and density of human-nature interactions on IGS compared to formal green spaces, as well as comparing different types of IGS and formal green spaces. Our findings revealed no significant difference in the density of citizen science observations between IGS and formal green spaces, once the variance in available area of each land use is accounted for. Notably, railway and utility easements exhibited the highest density of citizen science observations among all types of IGS. This research demonstrates that IGS make an important contribution to urban green space networks and additional thought should be given to how urban planning and land management may further increase the value of these spaces for people interacting with nature.

A progressive sense of place and the open city: Micro-spatialities and micro-conflicts on a north London council estate

Doreen Massey’s progressive sense of place (2005) and Richard Sennett’s ethical case for the open city (2018) rely on seeing space as open. It is openness that guarantees an open future, an openness to others, and the possibility of a progressive politics. Curiously, the Garden City, for both, becomes a test case for a progressive sense of the open city. For Massey, her lived experience of growing up in Wythenshawe reveals both the possibility of, and also the undermining of, the possibility of creating a progressive sense of place. In contrast, Sennett sees the Garden City, for all its progressive elements, as ultimately blocking new ways of dwelling in the city. The Garden City, for him, is too closed to provide a progressive sense of place. In north London, we discover a hidden Garden City, with secret gardens. Its micro-spatialities – and its micro-conflicts – enable us to rethink both these accounts of a progressive sense of place and of the open city. Rather than seeing openness in a physical infrastructure of space and place, we wish to emphasize the openness and closedness that emerges from the ways the people encounter, manage and dispute the microspatialities of everyday life on the estate.

Secret Gardens, Ritualistic Renovations and Modernist Failures: On the out loud building of scenographies by Decoratelier

Surveying four projects by DECORATELIER, All Problems Can Never Be Solved (2012), INFINI 1-15 (2015-16), Underneath Which Rivers Flow (2019) and The Soft Layer (2019), this text explores how Belgian scenographer Jozef Wouters revisits, with his scenographic practice, the aesthetics and poetics of stage machinery and theatre technology in order to explore the potentiality of intervening by means of scenography in abandoned and forgotten urban sites.

Evaluation of a Serious Video Game to Facilitate Conversations About Human Papillomavirus Vaccination for Preteens: Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial.

BackgroundIn the United States, the most common sexually transmitted infection, human papillomavirus (HPV), causes genital warts and is associated with an estimated 33,700 newly diagnosed cancer cases annually. HPV vaccination, especially for preteens aged 11 to 12 years, is effective in preventing the acquisition of HPV and HPV-associated cancers. However, as of 2018, completion of the 2- or 3-dose HPV vaccination series increased only from 48.6% to 51.1% in teens aged 13 to 17 years, and this increase was observed only in boys. By comparison, 88.7% of teens had more than one dose of the recommended vaccine against tetanus, diphtheria, and acellular pertussis (Tdap), and 85.1% of teens had more than one dose of meningococcal vaccine. Immunizations for Tdap, meningococcal disease, and HPV can occur at the same clinical visit but often do not.ObjectiveVaccination against HPV is recommended for routine use in those aged 11 to 12 years in the United States, yet it is underutilized. We aimed to develop an educational video game to engage preteens in the decision to vaccinate.MethodsLand of Secret Gardens is a metaphor for protecting seedlings (body) with a potion (vaccine). We screened 131 dyads of parents and preteens from 18 primary practices in North Carolina who had not initiated HPV vaccination. We measured vaccination intentions, story immersion, and game play and documented HPV vaccination rates. A total of 55 dyads were enrolled, and we randomly assigned 28 (21 completed) to play the game and 27 (26 completed) to the comparison group.ResultsIn total, 18 preteens reported playing the game. The vaccination self-efficacy score was higher in the comparison group than the intervention group (1.65 vs 1.45; P=.05). The overall mean decisional balance score trended toward greater support of vaccination, although differences between the groups were not significant.. Vaccine initiation and completion rates were higher in the intervention group (22% vs 15%; P=.31) than in the comparison group (9% vs 2%; P=.10), although the difference was not significant.ConclusionsVideo games help preteens in the decision to pursue HPV vaccination. A serious video game on HPV vaccination is acceptable to parents and preteens and can be played as intended. Gamification is effective in increasing preteen interest in HPV vaccination, as game features support decision making for HPV vaccination.Trial RegistrationClinicalTrials.gov NCT04627298; https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04627298

Secret Gardens Under the Sea: What are Seagrass Meadows and Why are They Important?

In nearly all the seas around the world, in the shallow waters next to the land, are secret underwater gardens. These gardens are home to a special marine (saltwater) plant called seagrass. When seagrass grows in large areas, the habitat it creates is called a seagrass meadow. Seagrass meadows play an important role in keeping our oceans healthy and providing a home for all kinds of marine life. This marine life includes fishes that people eat, such as cod and plaice but also endangered species such as seahorses, turtles, and sea cows. Seagrasses absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide from the surrounding seawater, and so help to reduce the speed of climate change. Seagrasses help protect our coastlines from storms and rising tides because their leaves take energy out of the waves hitting the coast, and their roots act as an anchor in the underwater sand. Seagrasses also soak up nutrients and bacteria, helping to keep our seawater clean. But seagrasses around the world are being lost at a rate of about two football fields every hour. Lots of things can damage seagrass, from polluted water to boats dragging their anchors in seagrass meadows. Overfishing is a problem, since it causes an imbalance in the food chain. Unfortunately, seagrass does not get the attention it deserves because most people are unaware of its existence. We need to increase awareness of the importance of this beautiful and valuable habitat and get more people involved in monitoring and protecting seagrass, before it is too late.

Developing a Serious Videogame for Preteens to Motivate HPV Vaccination Decision Making: Land of Secret Gardens.

Vaccination against human papillomavirus (HPV) is routinely recommended for ages 11-12, yet in 2016 only 49.5% of women and 37.5% of men had completed the three-dose series in the United States. Offering information and cues to action through a serious videogame for preteens may foster HPV vaccination awareness, information seeking, and communication. An iterative process was used to develop an interactive videogame, Land of Secret Gardens. Three focus groups were conducted with 16 boys and girls, ages 11-12, for input on game design, acceptability, and functioning. Two parallel focus groups explored parents' (n = 9) perspectives on the game concept. Three researchers identified key themes. Preteens wanted a game that is both entertaining and instructional. Some parents were skeptical that games could be motivational. A back-story about a secret garden was developed as a metaphor for a preteen's body and keeping it healthy. The goal is to plant a lush secret garden and protect the seedlings by treating them with a potion when they sprout to keep them healthy as they mature. Points to buy seeds and create the potion are earned by playing mini-games. Throughout play, players are exposed to messaging about HPV and the benefits of the vaccine. Both boys and girls liked the garden concept and getting facts about HPV. Parents were encouraged to discuss the game with their preteens. Within a larger communication strategy, serious games could be useful for engaging preteens in health decision making about HPV vaccination.

Secret Gardens and Dusty Roads

The author examines the tensions present in every psychotherapy between the contract, on the one hand, and the illusions of the patient and therapist, on the other. She considers these as two of the various polarities through which the psychotherapeutic process develops with its intrinsic ambiguities. The role Berne assigned to illusion and disillusionment in life and in every psychotherapeutic process is compared with the various functions of illusion discussed by Winnicott and psychoanalysts of the British School. Considering the contract and illusions in a dialectic relationship, the author reflects on the clinical implications of the transactional analysis theory of contracts; discusses recent transactional analytic viewpoints, mainly from a relational perspective, that widen the clinical prospects of psychological contracts; and considers the possible implicit and dynamic influences of these developments. She also examines some specific illusions of patients and therapists and considers their implicit links with clinical models common to various psychotherapeutic theories.

Cruising Henry James

While it has become nearly axiomatic to read Henry James's style as a privileged site for discussions of the unrepresentability of desire, I argue that in The American Scene James exhibits a literary style intimately related to the historical specificity of homosexual desire and the material networks of male-male cruising. To do so, I focus on James's overriding interest in what he calls “the life ‘socially’ led.” Drawing on his use of the metaphor of a secret garden to praise the Presbyterian Hospital, I show how James's preferred social aesthetic forms appear modeled on a particular form of “the life ‘socially’ led”: the actual network of secret gardens, streets, and parks where men cruised other men. Male homosexual cruising, I suggest, can be read not only as James's model for aesthetic form itself but also as his privileged mode of sociality, and where both should be read as profoundly materialist in their confrontation with an increasingly pervasive commodity culture in America.

“All Land Is One Land Under the Sea”: Mapping Memory in Canada and the Caribbean

the hummingbird's tongue is forked. My father is dead.These two things I know to be true - the rest is speculation. Fortunately, as a writer of speculative fiction, I am accustomed to using my imagination to fill in the blanks, and my generalised anxiety disorder prompts me to endlessly ask, What if? For over a year I have been formulating an experimental memoir on memory, migration, and mental illness, but I have struggled to find a form that will lend coherence to the complicated history that led my father to leave the Caribbean following his mothers alleged death in an Antiguan asylum in 1956. My goal in writing my planned memoir The Hummingbird's Tongue is to map my father's journey as well as my own; there have been times in my life when I have followed closely in my father's footsteps, yet I have also tried to open some of the doors he closed as I reverse the migration I suspect he meant to be final.Since I am not yet ready to write this memoir, I instead have been thinking about islands and the different archipelagos to which I have been drawn over the years. My first overseas trip was to Jamaica when I was fifteen, and five years later I left Canada for England, the island - for better or worse - to which I am most drawn. I currently live in New York City, which is another archipelago, and from here I have started to build relationships with the people in Nevis that my father loved but left behind. When I sit down to write and no words appear on the page, I wonder if my psychic distance from the Caribbean is to blame. Antiguan author and avid gardener Jamaica Kincaid began to dig flowerbeds in her Vermont backyard and did not realise until she put the shovel down that her chaotic design resembled an archipelago. I am unlikely to have such a lucky accident, so I must find or develop a form for prose that reflects the separateness and the unity of a chain of islands.In 2005 I wrote my first memoir, Stranger in the Family. Following the death of my father and the unexpected termination of what was supposed to be a year-long teaching assignment in East Africa, I moved back into my childhood home in Toronto and wrote a series of essays in order to make sense of my grief and rage. Unable to find a Canadian publisher, I returned to the USA, set the manuscript aside for three years, and then chose to selfpublish it as a mixed-media memoir that examines the shifting terrain upon which we negotiate race, kinship, and identity. A couple of years before his death, in the heat of an argument, my father said, You're a stranger in this family. I decided to use his accusation as the title of my memoir since it also accurately reflected the feeling of alienation I experienced in Djibouti and within my country of origin, Canada.I grew up in the suburbs of Toronto, dreaming of magical wardrobes and secret gardens. Doors figured rather prominently in my imagination, and the books I read were windows into other worlds. They were not, however, much of a mirror for my young black female self. I learned early on that only white children had wonderful adventures in distant lands; only white children were magically transported through time and space; only white children found the buried key that unlocked their own private Eden. Looking back on those days now at the age of forty, I marvel at the girl I once was. Why would a plump, brown-skinned girl with an Afro embark on a quest to read all the books she could find by C.S. Lewis and Frances Hodgson Burnett? Was I an Anglophile in training, or was my taste in books inevitable given the lack of multicultural literature available in Canada? Up until grade three, I started each school day by singing God Save the Queen, so perhaps my taste in literature was the inevitable result of Canada's colonial legacy.Whatever the reason, I have since made peace with my past self - or at least I have tried. In his unfinished memoir my father wrote, Deep underneath may be the desire to break out of who we have been made [into] and create a new me, but we can't, and on this one point, at least, we agree. …

Seamus Heaney, Zbigniew Herbert, and the Moral Imperative

Seamus Heaney, Zbigniew Herbert, and the Moral Imperative

Earth perfect?: nature, utopia and the garden

Earth Perfect? Nature, Utopia and the Garden is an eclectic, yet rigorous reflection on the relationship--historical, present and future--between humanity and the garden. Through the lens of Utopian Studies--the interdisciplinary field that encompasses fictions all the way through to actual political projects, and urban ideals; in a nutshell, addressing the human natural drive towards the ideal--Earth Perfect? brings together a selection of inspiring essays, each contributed by foremost writers from the fields of architecture, history of art, classics, cultural studies, farming, geography, horticulture, landscape architecture, law, literature, philosophy, urban planning and the natural sciences.Through these joined voices, the emerges as a site of contestation and a repository for symbolic, spiritual, social, political and ecological meaning. Questions such as: what is the role of the in defining humanity's ideal relationship with nature? and how should we in the face of catastrophic ecological decline? are addressed through wideranging case studies, including ancient Roman Gardens in Pompeii, Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, the Gardens of Versailles, organic farming in New England and Bohemia's secret gardens, as well as landscape in contemporary architecture.Issues relating to the utopian are explored thematically rather than chronologically, and organised in six chapters: Being in nature, inscribing the garden, green/house, The politic, economies of the garden and how then shall we garden?. each essay is both individual in scope and part of the wider discourse of the book as a whole, and each is lusciously illustrated, bringing to life the subject with diverse visual material ranging from photography to historical documents, maps and artworks.

The Secret Gardens of Nablus: Community and Food Security under Occupation

The Secret Gardens of Nablus: Community and Food Security under Occupation

Writing the book for a musical: Secret Gardens, the art of collaboration and the state of the British musical – an interview with Garry Lyons

Garry Lyons is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter, producer and academic. He is currently Lecturer in Writing for Performance & Performance Production within the School of Performance & Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds, and Programme Leader for the School's M.A. in Writing for Performance & Publication. He began his career in the 1980s with Major Road Theatre Company and as Director of the Theatre in the Mill, Bradford before turning freelance. His theatre writing includes Frankie and Tommy (Lyric, Hammersmith, 2000), Wicked, Yaar! (National Theatre, 1994) and Mohicans (Donmar Warehouse, 1984), and among his screen credits are the Royal Television Society award-winning Decisions (Channel 4, 2004), Britain's First Suicide Bombers (BBC 2, 2006) and four seasons of the Bafta-nominated children's series The Worst Witch (ITV, 1998–2001), which has been broadcast in more than 60 countries worldwide. His adaptation of The Secret Garden played to sold-out houses over the festive season at the West Yorkshire Playhouse (2009–2010) and Birmingham Repertory Theatre (2010–2011). The Independent described the new musical as having 'a filmic quality' and added 'this Secret Garden doesn't shout its secrets at the audience. Instead, it creates some lovely musical intimacies which enhance the magical sense of human fragility and reality on stage'. Here, Lyons talks to George Rodosthenous (Lecturer in Music Theatre, University of Leeds) about his collaboration with the composer Tim Sutton and the director Ian Brown, writing the book for a musical specifically 'for a regional English audience' and how 'the lack of encouragement and investment in new musicals in this country is woeful'.

Efféminés, Gigolos, and MSMs in the Cyber-Networks, Coffeehouses, and “Secret Gardens” of Contemporary Tunis

This ethnographic essay reflects research conducted in urban Tunisia among two distinct, yet interrelated, groups of young “men who have sex with men” (MSMs). Theoretically, the essay focuses on the politics of identity categories, how these categories travel, and the intersections of their associated onto-epistemic instantiations. While the principal focus is on the movement of the categories of éffeminés, gigolos, and MSMs, it also considers the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a gay movement in Tunisia, enhanced by Internetbased technologies. Analysis is derived from ethnographic field materials (2003–2010) and interactions on social networking sites. A lack of cohesion among and between these groups highlights the absence of significant shared objectives that serve individuals in an effort toward solidarity, while simultaneously suggesting that the subject position of “gay” provides a key site from which micro-practices and techniques of the self challenge and reinforce identity politics. Ultimately, in light of the infrapolitics of both groups, coupled with the increasing accessibility of online networking tools in Tunisia, this essay demonstrates that same-sex intimacies have not been a salient political concern for the Tunisian state, although recent events suggest a pronouncedly different future.

Surveying European Women's History since the Millenium: A Comparative Review

Surveying European Women's History since the Millenium:A Comparative Review Karen Offen (bio) Barbara Caine and Glenda Sluga. Gendering European History, 1780–1920. London and New York: Leicester University Press, 2000. 230 pp. ISBN 0-7185-0131-4 (cl); 0-7815-0132-2 (pb). Lynn Abrams . The Making of Modern Woman: Europe 1789–1918. London: Longman, an imprint of Pearson Education, 2002. x + 382 pp. ISBN 0-582-41410-5 (pb). Fiona Montgomery and Christine Collette, eds. The European Women's History Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. x + 380 pp. ISBN 0-415-22081-5 (cl); 0-415-22082-3 (pb). Gisela Bock . Women in European History. Translated by Allison Brown. The Making of Europe Series. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. x + 304 pp. ISBN 0-631-23191-9 (cl); 0-631-19145-3 (pb). [End Page 154] Mary S. Hartman . The Household and the Making of History: A Subversive View of the Western Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xi + 297 pp. ISBN 0-521-82972-0 (cl); 0-521-53669-3 (pb). Rachel G. Fuchs and Victoria E. Thompson. Women in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Gender and History. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. viii + 208 pp. ISBN 0-333-67605-X (cl); 0-333-67606-8 (pb). Mary Jo Maynes, Birgitte Søland, and Christina Benninghaus, eds. Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills: Placing Girls in European History, 1750–1960. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. x + 312 pp. ISBN 0-253-34449-2 (cl); 0-253-21710-5 (pb). Deborah Simonton , ed. The Routledge History of Women in Europe since 1700. London: Routledge, 2006. xvii + 397 pp. ISBN 0-415-30103-3 (cl); 0-415-43813-6 (pb). Ann Taylor Allen . Women in Twentieth-Century Europe. Gender and History. New York and Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. ix + 208 pp. ISBN 1-403-94192-0 (cl); 1-403-94193-9 (pb). Attempts to survey modern European women's history have come a long way since the 1970s. From Becoming Visible: Women in European History, edited by Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (1977; 1987; 1997), to the remarkable five volume History of Women in the West, edited and overseen by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot (English edition, 1992–94), via Patricia Branca's brief, role-centered Women in Europe since 1750 (1978), Priscilla Robertson's eccentric and entertaining An Experience of Women: Pattern and Change in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1984), and Marilyn J. Boxer's and Jean H. Quataert's innovative thematic approach in Connecting Spheres: Women in the Western World, 1500 to the Present (1987; 2000), we can now draw on a vastly broader scope of knowledge about women of every rank, religion, and situation (urban or rural).1 These edited essay collections, while chronologically comprehensive, never pretended to be synthetic or truly comparative as did Bonnie G. Smith's 560 page synthesis Changing Lives: Women in European History Since 1700 (1989).2 Undoubtedly the most ambitious synthetic effort to date is A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present, by Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser (1988; 2000).3 There is no doubt that women's history is infinitely richer, vastly more informed, nuanced, complex and comprehensive, reflecting the diversity of the women being studied as well as the mass of findings. But have we arrived at a truly comprehensive, comparative history of European women? We now know enough to launch studies that explore similarities and differences, along with change over time and space. Yet comparative work that bridges more than two countries remains at an early stage. The expertise of most Anglophone scholars, largely national and monolingual (or, at best, bilingual) limits their capacity to work in the primary sources of more than a few prominent European countries, a handicap that becomes increasingly apparent as women's history scholarship in Hungarian, Russian, various Slavic languages, and Greek advances. Reliance on secondary works, especially in English or French, becomes increasingly necessary and increasingly problematic. Scholars based in Europe, notably Anne Cova, now spearhead efforts to encourage comparative analysis among other European-based women's historians. With few exceptions, however, these [End Page 155] colleagues remain bounded, even more than we Anglophones, by the...

Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills: Placing Girls in European History, 1750-1960 Edited by M. J. Maynes, B. Soland and C. Benninghaus

Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills: Placing Girls in European History, 1750-1960 Edited by M. J. Maynes, B. Soland and C. Benninghaus

Noel Streatfeild's Secret Gardens

Noel Streatfeild's Secret Gardens

Of School and the River: The Wind in the Willows and its Immediate Audience

Wind in the Willows is most innocently appreciated as nostalgic fantasy: a pastoral celebration of life along the riverbank, where the four primary animal gentlemen Mole, Rat, Badger, and Toad enjoy a series of picaresque adventures that often involve messing about in boats but always end with a return to their snug and com- fortable homes. novel's episodes promote friendship, courtesy, competence, courage, and generosity in an idyllic world where sex, work, violence, and death are beyond the horizon. Experienced readers contextualize the story in var- ious ways. For Humphrey Carpenter the riverbank consti- tutes an Arcadia, one of the secret gardens characterizing the Golden Age of children's literature. Kenneth Grahame's biographer Peter Green sees the novel as a psychological escape for its author, Grahame's refuge from his disastrous marriage and his mundane, if well-compensated, job in the Bank of England. Lois Kuznets points out the mock-epic Odyssean theme and structure. Peter Hunt sees the novel as idyll, Bildungsroman, sociological document on class warfare, anarchist comedy, burlesque, nostalgia, sexist con- servative tract—by fits and starts, all of these (97). novel richly repays all such readings, but here I would like to head back to the text's origins, curiously neg- lected by most interpreters of the book and warranting examination of the sort Marilyn Butler calls for when she observes, The writings of the past ask for an educated read- ing, as far as possible from within their own discourse or code or cultural system (43). It is particularly worth remembering that the narrative involves not only a specific author but also a specific addressee. Wind in the Willows began as a series of bedtime stories that Grahame told his son Alastair in 1904, evolved into story letters when the two were apart in 1907, and finally took published form in 1908. In this essay, I contend that what Grahame wanted to pass down to Alastair, from father to son, from public- school old boy to future new boy, is material designed to inform the child about his future education, presented in a form meant to be palatable and accessible to the four-year- old audience of the oral stories and the seven-year-old on holiday with his governess. story of the neophyte Mole, who makes friends, acquires knowledge and skills, and widens his world, is specifically applicable to the situation Alastair was shortly to face. Though Wind in the Willows serves admirably as a general guidebook to the ways of that interesting young the English schoolboy, its fictive and rhetorical strategies specifically reflect the particular anxieties and circumstances of its author and its addressee.

The Representation of Nature in The Wind in the Willows and The Secret Garden

The Representation of Nature in The Wind in the Willows and The Secret Garden Jane Darcy (bio) In some recent criticism of books for children from the late Victorian and Edwardian period, there is a tendency to set up an opposition between fantasy and realism when discussing their representation of nature. This criticism often focuses on what is perceived as a general tendency on the part of children’s writers in this period to idealize and romanticize childhood by depicting children or childlike figures leading an idyllic life in a rural environment. Because such representations do not appear to reflect the realities of emerging democracy in what had become a complex industrial and urban society, they are seen as backward looking and as evading the “truth.” Jacqueline Rose, for example, in her book The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984) maintains that children’s fiction perpetuates a notion of childhood and of the relationship between children and the natural world that runs right through from Rousseau to Alan Garner. This notion, she argues, projects onto the child an idea of childhood innocence and instinctive contact with the nonrational, nonverbal world of nature that is what adults want children to have. Writing of Alan Garner’s later work, she remarks: The child is placed in a rural community of ironsmiths, stonemasons and agricultural labour. Here—in moments of recognition uncontaminated by industry or literacy—the child reads off from the land, the earth and the sky its own truth and a nature which would otherwise perish. . . . In Rousseau, education preserves nature in the child, and it recovers nature through the child. In much the same way, literature for Garner gives back to children, and to us, something innocent and precious which we have destroyed. . . . (44–45) [End Page 211] For Rose, there can be no such thing as children’s fiction, because this idealizing is not a true representation of what childhood is like, but an adult remaking of it in its own image, which constitutes a kind of oppression. The view that children’s books, by their very nature, cannot deal with realities is also expressed by Humphrey Carpenter in the “prologue” to Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (1985), though he approaches it from a different angle to Rose: “All children’s books are about ideals. Adult fiction sets out to portray and explain the world as it really is; books for children present it as it should be” (1). Furthermore, we find that as Carpenter’s popular and readable (if controversial) study progresses with chapters on individual authors, the mixture of literary criticism and biography he employs conveys the strong impression that the classic writers of children’s books were not idealizing but evading the “real” world in their work. Almost every one of his subjects—which include Charles Kingsley, Lewis Carroll, Richard Jefferies, Kenneth Grahame, E. Nesbit, James Barrie, and A. A. Milne—is seen as turning to writing as an escape from some inadequacy or unhappiness in his or her own life. It is this, as much as any desire to explore their created worlds, that appears to interest Carpenter about these writers. He says, for instance, of Grahame, “He wished to revisit childhood because of the possibilities it offered of Escape” (120). What Grahame apparently wanted to escape from was his wife Elspeth, who “poured out, in the bad poems she wrote in large quantities, her resentment at his coldness and neglect of her” (152). In his endeavor to escape, Grahame created The Wind in the Willows, which Carpenter considers a fine achievement because, “Of all the Victorians and Edwardians who tried to create Arcadia in print, only Grahame really managed it” (155). Again, New Historicism has rightly drawn to our attention the importance of studying the text in relation to its cultural context and the conditions of its production and consumption. In a New Historicist reading, texts such as The Wind in the Willows and The Secret Garden can also become somewhat suspect, because they are seen to perpetuate myths about Englishness in their representation of nature and country life. Mitzi Myers...

O jardim secreto Notas sobre Bataille e Foucault

On several occasions, Michel Foucault expressed his affinity with the thinking of Georges Bataille, even going so far as to present himself as the latter's disciple. Such filiation can indeed be perceived in the intensity with which both scholars engaged themselves in deconstructing the modern notion of reason, as anchored to the notions of knowledge and truth. A stricter approximation of the two thinkers, however, places us before significant differences, which indicate differing critical fundaments. Architecture suggests itself as a privileged locus for engaging on an analysis of such differences. Foucault observes buildings from within; Bataille sees them from the outside. This brings about distinct results: if, for the creator of The microphysics of power, a cul de sac is etched, for the author of The inner experience the possibility of conceiving 'secret gardens' offers itself, in contraposition to the threatening monuments. This, in turn, hints at different readers of Nietszche.