Autorentext

Clémence Laburthe-Tolra holds a PhD in British Literature. She is currently teaching anglophone literature as well as translation at Université d'Angers, France, and is an Associate Member of the research unit EMMA at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier.

Aurélien Wasilewski is Associate Professor at Paris-Panthéon-Assas University.

Klappentext

Gardening in the British Isles (1830-1950). Growing Agency in a Democratising Society explores the power dynamics that took root and flourished in nineteenth- and twentieth-century gardens in the United Kingdom. Examining a wide range of gardens (from private plots and nurseries to school gardens and public parks), gardeners (artists and writers, allotment holders and landlords, designers and landscapers, urban planners and slum dwellers, horticultural educators and pupils, nursery proprietors and plant customers, social reformists and trade unionists), gardening accounts (press articles, essays, diaries and novels), as well as practices across England, Ireland and Scotland from the Victorian era to the post-war period, the book uncovers the aesthetic, social and political discourses that grew in the garden and underpinned various modes of control, democratisation or self-assertion. Considering gardens as physical places, designed compositions, and spaces in motion, i.e. in situ, de visu and de motu, Gardening in the British Isles (1830-50) probes the social history of gardens and gardening, showing how social evolutions within the garden mirrored and even shaped collective imagination, horticultural taste and literary representation.

Inhalt

Introduction - Gardeners in motion: mobility, inclusion and diversity through cultivation
Clémence Laburthe-Tolra and Aurélien Wasilewski

Part 1 - Framing authority
Chapter 1 - Roast beef and plum pudding: the ceremony and symbolism of nineteenth-century allotment rent suppers
Jeremy Burchardt
Chapter 2 - Reforming school gardening: the work of Chrystabel Procter (1916-52)
Florence Pinard-Nelson
Chapter 3 - Formal gardens and novel forms: artifice and agency in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)
Niketa Narayan

Part 2 - Cultivating empowerment
Chapter 4 - Groundbreaking woman: the people's gardens of Norah Geddes
Susan Reid
Chapter 5 - The decisive influence of the British model on the feminisation of horticulture in France at the turn of the twentieth century
Julien Bastoen
Chapter 6 - In pursuit of the 'simple life': the radical origins of a Women's violet nursery in Henfield, England
Rebecca Welshman

Part 3 - Negotiating gender, intimacy and connoisseurship
Chapter 7 - Time at work in the garden: writing life and movement in Emily Lawless's A Garden Diary (1901)
Marie Mianowski
Chapter 8 - 'Beyond the reach of mere botany': amateurship in Vita Sackville-West's Some Flowers
Daria Tolokonnikova
Chapter 9 - Defining the 'working amateur' at Munstead Wood: Gertrude Jekyll and the gardening profession
Caroline Ikin