The Poem and the Garden: Rival Media in Early Modern England

FAIN: FA-232872-16

Deborah Cosier Solomon
Auburn University at Montgomery (Montgomery, AL 36117-7088)

A book-length study of the relationships between poetic craft and garden design in 16th- and 17th-century England.
 

This project explores how the major aesthetic conventions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry take shape through garden imagery. To place poetry in the garden and the garden in poetry was not just a reiteration of old metaphors; it represented a kind of decorum, a means of matching work to site in a way that could offer readers a rich array of multi-media allusions and varied (sometimes paradoxically varied) points of view. In order to demonstrate this aesthetic interchange between garden and lyric, the present study ranges through a number of generic spaces, from sixteenth-century plays and sonnet sequences to seventeenth-century pastoral modes. Drawing attention to the distinctively trans-media manifestations of garden and lyric art introduces new perspectives on the cultural value of form and its involvement in matters of genre, print technology, environment, and self-fashioning.

Associated Products

The Poem and the Garden in Early Modern England (Book)
Title: The Poem and the Garden in Early Modern England
Author: Deborah Solomon
Editor: Marguerite Tassi
Editor: Carole Levin
Abstract: This book draws attention to the pervasive artistic rivalry between Elizabethan poetry and gardens in order to illustrate the benefits of a trans-media approach to the literary culture of the period. In its blending of textual studies with discussions of specific historical patches of earth, The Poem and the Garden demonstrates how the fashions that drove poetic invention were as likely to be influenced by a popular print convention or a particular garden experience as they were by the formal genres of the classical poets. By moving beyond a strictly verbal approach in its analysis of creative imitation, this volume offers new ways of appreciating the kinds of comparative and competitive methods that shaped early modern poetics. Noting shared patterns―both conceptual and material―in these two areas not only helps explain the persistence of botanical metaphors in sixteenth-century books of poetry but also offers a new perspective on the types of contrastive illusions that distinguish the Elizabethan aesthetic. With its interdisciplinary approach, The Poem and the Garden is of interest to all students and scholars who study early modern poetics, book history, and garden studies.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.routledge.com/The-Poem-and-the-Garden-in-Early-Modern-England-Rival-Media-in-the-Process/Solomon/p/book/9781032188805?utm_source=individuals&utm_medium=shared_link&utm_campaign=B030652_hg2_1au_7pp_d876_november2022inproduction
Primary URL Description: This is the official Routledge book page.
Secondary URL: https://smile.amazon.com/Garden-England-Interdisciplinary-Approaches-Culture/dp/1032188774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1672514391&sr=8-1
Publisher: Routledge
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 1032188774
Copy sent to NEH?: No

---