1st Edition
Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature
By Jennifer Munroe
Copyright 2008
146 Pages
by
Routledge
146 Pages
by
Routledge
146 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
Radical reconfigurations in gardening practice in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England altered the social function of the garden, offering men and women new opportunities for social mobility. While recent work has addressed how middle class men used the garden to attain this mobility, the gendering of the garden during the period has gone largely unexamined. This new study focuses on the... Read more
Contents: Introduction: laying the groundwork; Gardens, gender and writing; 'Planting English' and cultivating the gentleman: Spenser's gardens; Inheritance, land, and the garden space for women in Aemelia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (Hail, God, King of the Jews); 'In this strang labyrinth how shall I turn?': needlework, gardens, and writing in Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus; Epilogue; Works cited; Index.
Biography
Jennifer Munroe is Assistant Professor of English and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA.
'The dual focus - on physical and imagined gardens, constructed by both male and female gardeners - makes Munroe's literary interpretation into a gorgeous tapestry, that weaves together material and ideological concerns as well as giving non-literary materials aesthetic and ideological significance.' Ilona Bell, Williams College, USA 'While Roy Strong's The Renaissance Garden in England and David R. Coffin's many books focused on real garden aesthetics and scholars like John Dixon Hunt and Harry Berger Jr. have focused on the literary garden, Munroe's book is significant in the way it brings these two perspectives together and further focuses on gardening practice. This focus on the actual distribution of the physical garden space in comparison to the written discourse makes Munroe's book a unique and enlightened contribution to the study of gender in early modern literature.' Early Modern Literature Studies ’...Munroe’s study is an illuminating account of how contemporary gender politics permeated the horticultural space. Through readings of gardens real and imaginary, the author skilfully explores how readers, writers and indeed gardeners employed their own blessed plots as a medium for engagement with wider cultural, social, and political norms, and self-fashioning, especially among early modern women.’ Notes and Queries
