Garden Plots The Politics and Poetics of Gardens

Shelley Saguaro's unique book illustrates the persistent presence of gardens in literature. Gardens in fiction do not simply represent a familiar theme, Saguaro contends, but are bound up with wider aesthetic and ideological issues. As with literary forms, so too are gardens subject to transformations. Encompassing a wide array of twentieth- and twenty-first century authors, including Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, Carol Shields, J. M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, Jamaica Kincaid, Don DeLillo, and Philip K. Dick, this book's preoccupations are signalled in the evocatively titled chapters: Botanical Modernisms; Natural History and Postmodern Grafting; Postcolonial Landscapes; How Does Your Cyber Garden Grow?; and Coevolutionary Histories - the Poetics of a Paradox. Informed by postcolonial, formalist, feminist, and psychoanalytic theories, Garden Plots is a must read for all those alive to the space gardens inhabit in the literary landscape.

Contents: Introduction: The politics and poetics of gardens; Botanical modernisms; Natural history and postmodern grafting; Postcolonial landscapes; How does your cyber-garden grow?; Conclusion: coevolutionary histories - the poetics of a paradox; Select Bibliography; Index.

Shelley Saguaro is Head of Humanities at the University of Gloucestershire, UK. Her teaching and research have focussed on North American writing, and she is the editor of Psychoanalysis and Woman (2000), a collection of psychoanalytic writings.