Landscapes of the New West

Landscapes of the New West PDF

Author: Krista Comer

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780807848135

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In the early 1970s, empowered by the civil rights and women's movements, a new group of women writers began speaking to the American public. Their topic, broadly defined, was the postmodern American West. By the mid-1980s, their combined works made for a bona fide literary groundswell in both critical and commercial terms. However, as Krista Comer notes, despite the attentions of publishers, the media, and millions of readers, literary scholars have rarely addressed this movement or its writers. Too many critics, Comer argues, still enamored of western images that are both masculine and antimodern, have been slow to reckon with the emergence of a new, far more "feminine," postmodern, multiracial, and urban west. Here, she calls for a redesign of the field of western cultural studies, one that engages issues of gender and race and is more self-conscious about space itself_especially that cherished symbol of western "authenticity," open landscape. Surveying works by Joan Didion, Wanda Coleman, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko, Barbara Kingsolver, Pam Houston, Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, and Mary Clearman Blew, Comer shows how these and other contemporary women writers have mapped new geographical imaginations upon the cultural and social spaces of today's American West.

Women Poets in the Victorian Era

Women Poets in the Victorian Era PDF

Author: Fabienne Moine

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-09

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1134776535

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Examining the place of nature in Victorian women's poetry, Fabienne Moine explores the work of canonical and long-neglected women poets to show the myriad connections between women and nature during the period. At the same time, she challenges essentialist discourses that assume innate affinities between women and the natural world. Rather, Moine shows, Victorian women poets mobilised these alliances to defend common interests and express their engagement with social issues. While well-known poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti are well-represented in Moine's study, she pays particular attention to lesser known writers such as Mary Howitt or Eliza Cook who were popular during their lifetimes or Edith Nesbit, whose verse has received scant critical attention so far. She also brings to the fore the poetry of many non-professional poets. Looking to their immediate cultural environments for inspiration, these women reconstructed the natural world in poems that raise questions about the validity and the scope of representations of nature, ultimately questioning or undermining social practices that mould and often fossilise cultural identities.

Haunted Landscapes

Haunted Landscapes PDF

Author: Ruth Heholt

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2016-11-17

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1783488832

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Haunted Landscapes offers a fresh and innovative approach to contemporary debates about landscape and the supernatural. Landscapes are often uncanny spaces embroiled in the past; associated with absence, memory and nostalgia. Yet experiences of haunting must in some way always belong to the present: they must be felt. This collection of essays opens up new and compelling areas of debate around the concepts of haunting, affect and landscape. Landscape studies, supernatural studies, haunting and memory are all rapidly growing fields of enquiry and this book synthesises ideas from several critical approaches – spectral, affective and spatial – to provide a new route into these subjects. Examining urban and rural landscapes, haunted domestic spaces, landscapes of trauma, and borderlands, this collection of essays is designed to cross disciplines and combine seemingly disparate academic approaches under the coherent locus of landscape and haunting. Presenting a timely intervention in some of the most pressing scholarly debates of our time, Haunted Landscapes offers an attractive array of essays that cover topics from Victorian times to the present.

The Garden Politic

The Garden Politic PDF

Author: Mary Kuhn

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2023-02-07

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1479820156

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"The Garden Politic shows how Americans in the nineteenth century used plants to understand their nation, mobilizing them for many different political ends, from abolition to private property. It also shows the importance of everyday gardening practices to broader environmental understandings, and suggests the lessons that this earlier period might offer our contemporary environmental imaginations"--

'Disciples of Flora'

'Disciples of Flora' PDF

Author: Victoria Emma Pagán

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2015-09-04

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1443881317

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‘Disciples of Flora’ explores, through a variety of approaches, disciplines, and historical periods, the place and vitality of gardens as cultural objects, repositories of meaning, and sites for the construction of identity and subjectivity; gardens being an eminent locus where culture and nature meet. This collection of essays contributes to a revision of histories of gardens by broadening the scope of scholarly inquiry to include a long history from ancient Rome to the present, in which contesting memories delineate new apprehensions of topography and space. The contributors draw attention to alternative landscapes or gardening practices, while recalling the ways in which spaces have been invested with an affective dimension that has itself been historicized.

Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany

Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany PDF

Author: Linda Hughes

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-06-09

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1009080776

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Shedding new light on the alternative, emancipatory Germany discovered and written about by progressive women writers during the long nineteenth century, this illuminating study uncovers a country that offered a degree of freedom and intellectual agency unheard of in England. Opening with the striking account of Anna Jameson and her friendship with Ottilie von Goethe, Linda K. Hughes shows how cultural differences spurred ten writers' advocacy of progressive ideas and provided fresh materials for publishing careers. Alongside well-known writers – Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Michael Field, Elizabeth von Arnim, and Vernon Lee – this study sheds light on the lesser-known writers Mary and Anna Mary Howitt, Jessie Fothergill, and the important Anglo-Jewish lesbian writer Amy Levy. Armed with their knowledge of the German language, each of these women championed an extraordinarily productive openness to cultural exchange and, by approaching Germany through a female lens, imported an alternative, 'other' Germany into English letters.

Women and the Collaborative Art of Gardens

Women and the Collaborative Art of Gardens PDF

Author: Victoria E. Pagán

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-11-30

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 1000999912

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Women and the Collaborative Art of Gardens explores the garden and its agency in the history of the built and natural environments, as evidenced in landscape architecture, literature, art, archaeology, history, photography, and film. Throughout the book, each chapter centers the act of collaboration, from garden clubs of the early twentieth century as powerful models of women’s leadership, to the more intimate partnerships between family members, to the delicate relationship between artist and subject. Women emerge in every chapter, whether as gardeners, designers, owners, writers, illustrators, photographers, filmmakers, or subjects, but the contributors to this dynamic collection unseat common assumptions about the role of women in gardens to make manifest the significant ways in which women write themselves into the accounts of garden design, practice, and history. The book reveals the power of gardens to shape human existence, even as humans shape gardens and their representations in a variety of media, including brilliantly illuminated manuscripts, intricately carved architectural spaces, wall paintings, black and white photographs, and wood cuts. Ultimately, the volume reveals that gardens are best apprehended when understood as products of collaboration. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of gardens and culture, ancient Rome, art history, British literature, medieval France, film studies, women’s studies, photography, African American Studies, and landscape architecture.

Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840

Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840 PDF

Author: Freya Gowrley

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2022-03-10

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1501343351

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Between 1750 and 1840, the home took on unprecedented social and emotional significance. Focusing on the design, decoration, and reception of a range of elite and middling class homes from this period, Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840 demonstrates that the material culture of domestic life was central to how this function of the home was experienced, expressed, and understood at this time. Examining craft production and collection, gift exchange and written description, inheritance and loss, it carefully unpacks the material processes that made the home a focus for contemporaries' social and emotional lives. The first book on its subject, Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840 employs methodologies from both art history and material culture studies to examine previously unpublished interiors, spaces, texts, images, and objects. Utilising extensive archival research; visual, material, and textual analysis; and histories of emotion, sociability, and materiality, it sheds light on the decoration and reception of a broad array of domestic spaces. In so doing, it writes a new history of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century domestic space, establishing the materiality of the home as a crucial site for identity formation, social interaction, and emotional expression.