{"product_id":"novel-cultivations","title":"Novel Cultivations","description":"Nineteenth-century English nature was a place of experimentation, exoticism, and transgression, as site and emblem of the global exchanges of the British Empire. Popular attitudes toward the transplantation of exotic species—botanical and human—to Victorian greenhouses and cities found anxious expression in a number of fanciful genre texts, including mysteries, science fiction, and horror stories.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSituated in a mid-Victorian moment of frenetic plant collecting from the far reaches of the British empire, \u003ci\u003eNovel Cultivations\u003c\/i\u003e recognizes plants as vital and sentient subjects that serve—often more so than people—as actors and narrative engines in the nineteenth-century novel. Conceptions of native and natural were decoupled by the revelation that nature was globally sourced, a disruption displayed in the plots of gardens as in those of novels.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eElizabeth Chang examines here the agency asserted by plants with shrewd readings of a range of fictional works, from monstrous rhododendrons in Daphne du Maurier's \u003ci\u003eRebecca\u003c\/i\u003e and Mexican prickly pears in Olive Schreiner's \u003ci\u003eStory of an African Farm,\u003c\/i\u003e to Algernon Blackwood's hair-raising  \u003ci\u003e\"\"The Man Whom the Trees Loved\"\"\u003c\/i\u003e and other obscure ecogothic tales. This provocative contribution to ecocriticism shows plants as buttonholes between fiction and reality, registering changes of form and content in both realms.","brand":"University of Virginia Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54230570664280,"sku":"9780813942476","price":67.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9780813942476.jpg?v=1778903153","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/novel-cultivations","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}