Gardenland : nature, fantasy, and everyday practice / Jennifer Wren Atkinson.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Garden writing is not just a place to find advice about roses and rutabagas; it also contains hidden histories of desire, hope, and frustration and tells a story about how Americans have invested grand fantasies in the common soil of everyday life. Gardenland chronicles the development of this genre across key moments in American literature and history, from nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization to the twentieth-century rise of factory farming and environmental advocacy to contemporary debates about public space and social justice--even to the consideration of the future of humanity's place on earth. Gardenland examines literary fiction, horticultural publications, and environmental writing, including works by Charles Dudley Warner, Henry David Thoreau, Willa Cather, Jamaica Kincaid, John McPhee, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Ultimately, Gardenland asks what the past century and a half of garden writing might tell us about our current social and ecological moment, and it offers surprising insight into our changing views about the natural world, along with realms that may otherwise seem remote from the world of leeks and hollyhocks"-- Provided by publisher

American garden writing and the reinvention of work as play -- Lost at home: mapping the industrial-era garden and farm -- Resensualizing the garden: from surface to substance in midcentury food -writing -- Against the grain: reinventing the garden in contemporary utopia -- Just gardens: uprooting and recovery in the postcolonial garden -- Epilogue. garden writing and the phenomenology of dirt.

Print version record.

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