Description
Book SynopsisEcoGothic gardens in the long nineteenth century provides fresh approaches to contemporary ecocritical and environmental debates, providing new, compelling insights into material relationships between vegetal and human beings. Through eleven exciting essays, the collection demonstrates how unseen but vital relationships among plants and their life systems can reflect and inform human behaviours and actions. In these entertaining essays, human and vegetal agency is interpreted through ecocritical and ecoGothic investigation of uncanny manifestations in gardens – hauntings, psychic encounters, monstrous hybrids, fairies and ghosts – with plants, greenhouses, granges, mansions, lakes, lawns, flowerbeds and trees as agents and sites of uncanny developments. The collection represents the forefront of ecoGothic critical debate and will be welcomed by specialists in environmental humanities at every level, as a timely, innovative inclusion in ecoGothic studies.
Trade Review'Ferns often represent ‘fascination’, and this is a great way to define my feelings about EcoGothic Gardens: there is much to fascinate in this collection.'
Jemma Stewart, The Dark Arts Journal
'EcoGothic Gardens convincingly demonstrates that horticultural space was anything but neutral in the nineteenth century [...] This book adds to a growing body of scholarship on Gothic ecologies and is essential reading for anyone working on Victorian horticulture.'
Lindsay Wells, Victorian Studies
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Table of ContentsIntroduction: Phantoms, fantasy and uncanny flowers – Sue Edney
1 Deadly gardens: The 'Gothic green' in Goethe and Eichendorff – Heather I. Sullivan
2 'Diabolic clouds over everything': An ecoGothic reading of John Ruskin's garden at Brantwood – Caroline Ikin
3 The Gothic orchard of the Victorian imagination – Joanna Crosby
4 Gothic Eden: Gardens, religious tradition and ecoGothic exegesis in Algernon Blackwood’s 'The Lost Valley' and 'The Transfer' – Christopher M. Scott
5 'That which roars further out': Gardens and wilderness in 'The Man who Went too Far' by E. F. Benson and 'The Man Whom the Trees Loved' by Algernon Blackwood – Ruth Heholt
6 Darwin's plants and Darwin's gardens: Sex, sensation and natural selection – Jonathan Smith
7 'Tentacular thinking' and the 'abcanny' in Hawthorne's Gothic gardens of masculine egotism – Shelley Saguaro
8 Green is the new black: Plant monsters as ecoGothic tropes; vampires and femme fatales – Teresa Fitzpatrick
9 Death and the fairy: Hidden gardens and the haunting of childhood – Francesca Bihet
10 Presence and absence in Tennyson's gardens of grief: 'Mariana', Maud and Somersby – Sue Edney
11 Blackwater Park and the haunting of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White – Adrian Tait
Afterword: Z Vesper, the Wilderness Garden, Powis Castle – Paul Evans
Index
