Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens

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Cornell University Press, 2003 - 198 páginas

For Rebecca Bushnell, English gardening books tell a fascinating tale of the human love for plants and our will to make them do as we wish. These books powerfully evoke the desires of gardeners: they show us gardeners who, like poets, imagine not just what is but what should be. In particular, the earliest English garden books, such as Thomas Hill's The Gardeners Labyrinth or Hugh Platt's Floraes Paradise, mix magical practices with mundane recipes even when the authors insist that they rely completely on their own experience in these matters. Like early modern "books of secrets," early gardening manuals often promise the reader power to alter the essential properties of plants: to make the gillyflower double, to change the lily's hue, or to grow a cherry without a stone. Green Desire describes the innovative design of the old manuals, examining how writers and printers marketed them as fiction as well as practical advice for aspiring gardeners. Along with this attention to the delights of reading, it analyzes the strange dignity and pleasure of garden labor and the division of men's and women's roles in creating garden art. The book ends by recounting the heated debate over how much people could do to create marvels in their own gardens. For writers and readers alike, these green desires inspired dreams of power and self-improvement, fantasies of beauty achieved without work, and hopes for order in an unpredictable world--not so different from the dreams of gardeners today.

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Índice

INTRODUCTION
1
Composing Gardens
12
The Printed Garden
49
Labor Pleasure and Art
84
The Ladies Part
108
Garden Society
132
Telling the Truth
161
CONCLUSION
189
Index
193
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Rebecca Bushnell is Professor of English and Dean of the College, University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance, and Prophesying Tragedy: Sign and Voice in Sophocles' Theban Plays, all from Cornell, and editor of A Companion to Tragedy.

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