| Description |
1 online resource (vi, 367 pages) ; illustrations (black and white) |
| Contents |
Part I. Bound flowers, loose leaves: the form and force of plants in print -- "What kind of thing I am": plant books in space and time -- On "vertue": textual force and vegetable capacity -- Branch: the traffic in small things in Romeo and Juliet -- Part II. Scattered, sown, slipped: printed gardens in the 1570s -- Sundry flowers by sundry gentlemen -- Isabella Whitney's Dispersals -- Branch: how to read like a pig -- Part III. An increase of small things -- Richard Tottel, Thomas Tusser, and the minutiae of Shakespeare's Sonnets -- Epilogue: Heaps of experiment |
| Summary |
During the middle years of Queen Elizabeth's reign, the number of books published with titles that described themselves as flowers, gardens, or forests more than tripled. During those same years, English printers turned out scores of instructional manuals on gardening and husbandry, retailing useful knowledge to a growing class of literate landowners and pleasure gardeners. Both trends, Jessica Rosenberg shows, reflected a distinctive style of early modern plant-thinking, one that understood both plants and poems as composites of small pieces--slips or seeds to be recirculated by readers and planters. Botanical Poetics brings together studies of ecology, science, literary form, and the material text to explore how these developments transformed early modern conceptions of nature, poetic language, and the printed book. Drawing on little-studied titles in horticulture and popular print alongside poetry by Shakespeare, Spenser, and others, Rosenberg reveals how early modern print used a botanical idiom to anticipate histories of its own reading and reception, whether through replanting, uprooting, or fantasies of common property and proliferation. While our conventional narratives of English literary culture in this period see reading as an increasingly private practice, and literary production as more and more of an authorial domain, Botanical Poetics uncovers an alternate tradition: of commonplaces and common ground, of slips of herbs and poetry circulated, shared, and multiplied |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Online resource; title from PDF title page (De Gruyter platform, viewed January 30, 2023) |
| Subject |
English literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism
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Horticultural literature -- England -- History and criticism
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Plants in literature.
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Botany in literature.
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Early printed books -- England
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Horticulture -- England -- History
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Flowers in literature.
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Gardens in literature.
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LITERARY CRITICISM -- Renaissance.
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Botany in literature.
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Early printed books.
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English literature -- Early modern.
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Flowers in literature.
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Gardens in literature.
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Horticultural literature.
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Horticulture.
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Plants in literature.
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England.
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| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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History.
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Literary criticism.
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Literary criticism.
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| ISBN |
1512823341 |
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9781512823349 |
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