This is a book about a longstanding network of writers and writings that celebrate the aesthetic, socio-political, scientific, ecological, geographical, and historical value of trees and tree spaces in the landscape; and it is a study of the effect of this tree-writing upon the novel form in the long nineteenth century.Trees in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction: The Silvicultural Novel identifies the picturesque thinker William Gilpin as a significant influence in this li...

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.Her husband vanished after the wedding. No goodbye. No explanation. Had he ever been real at all?Sienna never expected her Roman holiday to end in heartbreak. Lars was everything she'd dreamed of—charming, mysterious, devastatingly handsome. Their whirlwind romance felt like fate. When he proposed on a sun-drenched hillside, she said yes without hesitation.The next morning, she woke up alone.No n...

Raymond Williams begins his brilliantly perceptive study of the English novel in the 1840s, a period of rapid social change brought on by the Industrial Revolution, the struggle for democratic reform, and the growth of cities and towns. Unsettling, indeed critical, for individuals and communities alike, this process of change prompted the novelists of the time to explore new forms of writing. The genius of Dickens, the powerful originality of the Bront? sisters, the passionate vision of Ge...

From ash die-back to the Great Storm of 1987 to Dutch elm disease, our much-loved woodlands seem to be under constant threat from a procession of natural challenges. Just when we need trees most, to help combat global warming and to provide places of retreat for us and our wildlife, they seem at greatest peril. But these dangers force us to reconsider the narrative we construct about trees and the roles we press on them.In this now classic book, Richard Mabey looks at how, for more...

Novel Science is the first in-depth study of the shocking, groundbreaking, and sometimes beautiful writings of the gentlemen of the "heroic age" of geology and of the contribution these men made to the literary culture of their day. For these men, literature was an essential part of the practice of science itself, as important to their efforts as mapmaking, fieldwork, and observation. The reading and writing of imaginative literatures helped them to discover, imagine, debate, and ...

Canadian literature has long been preoccupied with the wilderness and the landscape, but the garden has remained neglected terrain. In Garden Plots, Shelley Boyd focuses on private, domestic gardens tended by individual gardeners, to show how modest, everyday spaces provide fertile grounds for the imagination.Combining the history of gardening with literary analysis*, Garden Plots* explores the use of the garden motif in the works of five authors: Susanna Moodie, Catharine...

Reading Victorian literature and science in tandem, Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination investigates how the concept of energy was fictionalized - both mystified and demystified - during the rise of a new resource-intensive industrial and economic order. The first extended study of a burgeoning area of critical interest of increasing importance to twenty-first-century scholarship, it anchors its investigation at the very roots of the energy problem, in a period tha...

Botany in the romantic era played a role in debates about life, nature, and knowledge, as evidenced in this ambitious, beautifully illustrated study.Winner, 2012 British Society for Literature and Science Book PrizeRomanticism was a cultural and intellectual movement characterized by discovery, revolution, and the poetic as well as by the philosophical relationship between people and nature. Botany sits at the intersection where romantic scientific and lite...

A richly illustrated exploration of how late Georgian gardens associated with medical practitioners advanced science, education, and agricultural experimentationAs Britain grew into an ever-expanding empire during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, new and exotic botanical specimens began to arrive within the nation’s public and private spaces. Gardens became sites not just of leisure, sport, and aesthetic enjoyment, but also of scientific inquiry ...

Botanical gardens brought together in a single space the great diversity of the earth's flora. They displaced nature from forest and foothill and re-arranged it to reveal something of the scientific principles underpinning the apparent chaos of the wild. Nature Displaced, Nature Displayed shows how the design and display of such gardens was not determined by scientific principles alone. Through a study of three botanical gardens - belonging to the University of Cambridge, the Royal Dublin ...

A riveting look at how the early modern world revolutionized sleep and its relation to body, mind, soul, and society Drawing on diverse archival sources and material artifacts, Handley reveals that the way we sleep is as dependent on culture as it is on biological and environmental factors. After 1660 the accepted notion that sleepers lay at the mercy of natural forces and supernatural agents was challenged by new medical thinking about sleep’s relationship to the nervous ...

This collection of essays, both feminist and historical, analyzes power relations between men and women in the Victorian period. This volume is the first to reshape Victorian studies from the perspective of the postmodern return to history, and is variously influenced by Marxism, sociology, anthropology, and post-structuralist theories of language and subjectivity. It analyzes the struggle for legitimacy and recognition in Victorian institutions and the struggle over meanings in ideologica...