America S Romance With The English Garden

Named one of “the year’s best gardening books” by The Spectator (UK, Nov. 2014) The 1890s saw a revolution in advertising. Cheap paper, faster printing, rural mail delivery, railroad shipping, and chromolithography combined to pave the way for the first modern, mass-produced catalogs. The most prominent of these, reaching American households by the thousands, were seed and nursery catalogs with beautiful pictures of middle-class homes surrounded by sprawling lawns, exotic plants, and the latest garden accessories—in other words, the quintessential English-style garden. America’s Romance with the English Garden is the story of tastemakers and homemakers, of savvy businessmen and a growing American middle class eager to buy their products. It’s also the story of the beginnings of the modern garden industry, which seduced the masses with its images and fixed the English garden in the mind of the American consumer. Seed and nursery catalogs delivered aspirational images to front doorsteps from California to Maine, and the English garden became the look of America.

American novelist Edith Wharton (1862–1937) is best known today for her tales of the city and the experiences of patrician New Yorkers in the “Gilded Age.” This book pushes against the grain of critical orthodoxy by prioritizing other “species of spaces” in Wharton’s work. For example, how do Wharton’s narratives represent the organic profusion of external nature? Does the current scholarly fascination with the environmental humanities reveal previously unexamined or overlooked facets of Wharton’s craft? I propose that what is most striking about her narrative practice is how she utilizes, adapts, and translates pastoral tropes, conventions, and concerns to twentieth-century American actualities. It is no accident that Wharton portrays characters returning to, or exploring, various natural localities, such as private gardens, public parks, chic mountain resorts, monumental ruins, or country-estate “follies.” Such encounters and adventures prompt us to imagine new relationships with various geographies and the lifeforms that can be found there. The book addresses a knowledge gap in Wharton and the environmental humanities, especially recent debates in ecocriticism. The excavation of Wharton's words and the background of her narratives with an eye to offering an ecocritical reading of her work is what the book focuses on.

Garden writing is not just a place to find advice about roses and rutabagas; it also contains hidden histories of desire, hope, and frustration and tells a story about how Americans have invested grand fantasies in the common soil of everyday life. Gardenland chronicles the development of this genre across key moments in American literature and history, from nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization to the twentieth-century rise of factory farming and environmental advocacy to contemporary debates about public space and social justice—even to the consideration of the future of humanity’s place on earth. In exploring the hidden landscape of desire in American gardens, Gardenland examines literary fiction, horticultural publications, and environmental writing, including works by Charles Dudley Warner, Henry David Thoreau, Willa Cather, Jamaica Kincaid, John McPhee, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Ultimately, Gardenland asks what the past century and a half of garden writing might tell us about our current social and ecological moment, and it offers surprising insight into our changing views about the natural world, along with realms that may otherwise seem remote from the world of leeks and hollyhocks.

Ever since the word romantic and its many cognates in European languages began to be used as technical terms towards the end of the eighteenth century, the quest for a satisfactory definition of their meanings has continued unabated. This collection of essays traces the history of the word in the major European languages, showing how romantic and its cognates were first introduced, how their usage spread and their connotations proliferated, and how their present usage became established. This book opens with an introduction by the editor, followed by an essay in which Professor Raymond Immerwaher, Chairman of the Department of German, University of Western Ontario, shows how romantic and its cognates became fashionable in England, France and Germany, and traces the extension of the meanings of these words up to 1790. The story is then taken up in individual essays on the history of the word and its cognates in the major European countries: in Germany, by the editor; in England, by Professor George Whalley, FRSC, of the Department of English, Queen's University, Kingston; in France, by Professor Maurice Z. Shroder of the Department of French, Barnard College, Columbia University; in Italy, by Professor Olga Ragusa of the Department of Italian, Columbia University; in Spain, by Professor Donald L. Shaw of the Department of Hispanic Studies, University of Edinburgh; in Scandinavia, by Professor P.M. Mitchell of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature, University of Illinois; and in Russia, by Professor Sigrid McLaughlin of the Department of Slavic Studies, University of California at Santa Cruz. The final essay, by H.H.H. Remak, Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Indiana, reports on trends of recent research on West European romanticism and suggests fruitful avenues for further exploration. The book will be of immense value to students and specialists interested in literary, linguistic and cultural aspects of romanticism, and to those concerned with comparative literature and the history of ideas. Hans Eicner taught at Queen's University, Kingston, from 1950 to 1967 when he was appointed Professor and Chairman of German, University of Toronto. Among his published books are: Thomas Mann, Eine Einführung in sein Werk; Friedrich Schlegel: Literary Notebooks 1797-1801; Reading German for Scientists; Kritische Friedrich Schlegel-Ausgabe (in four volumes); Four Modern German Authors: Mann, Rilke, Kafka, Brecht. In 1967 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Richard Taylor, author of the best-selling How to Read a Church, joins forces with garden historian Andrew Eburne to produce the ultimate guide to historic and modern gardens. Gardens are amongst the fastest-growing visitor attractions today - in the UK alone 15 million people will visit a garden this year. How to Read an English Garden is the essential book for every garden lover. It provides an account of the different elements of gardens of all ages and explains their meaning and their history: here, you'll find the answer to such questions as: when were tulips introduced into our gardens, and what was 'tulip-mania'? What is a knot-garden, and what was the origin of its design? Who was 'Capability' Brown, and how did he get his name? Why are mazes such a common feature in English garden design? In addition, the book explains how lawns, flowerbeds, trees and ponds came to be a feature not just of grand houses but of gardens everywhere. Among the many subjects covered are: garden design, plant introductions and collectors, kitchen gardens, water gardens, and garden styles from around the world: English, American, Chinese and Moorish to name just a few. Clearly laid out and beautifully illustrated, How to Read an English Garden brings historic and modern gardens to life: a book to accompany garden visitors everywhere, or to be enjoyed and dipped into at home.

Discusses a special case of syntax-morphology mismatch that puzzles current traditional morphological theories - the case of relational adjectives across languages.