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Forward plants and wanton women
Botany and sexual anxiety in the late eighteenth century
in Botany, sexuality and women’s writing 1760–1830
Chapter DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526130174.00009
Online Publication Date:
03 Oct 2017
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This chapter explores all of the poems in relation to Erasmus Darwin, beginning with a detailed look at Darwin's Loves of the Plants. The controversy surrounding this work changed the course of women's botany in England and ushered in a new, less enlightened age, dominated by works on 'ladies' botany' which rejected Carl Linnaeus's Sexual System for a 'natural system' of classification. Given the supposition that Flora was originally a common courtesan, the coupling of Flora and Linnaeus alludes to wanton sexuality in the vegetable kingdom. Darwin's Botanic Garden was extremely influential in popularising botany as a female pursuit; as already noted, it held a particular fascination for women. The Botanic Garden was considered to be a hotbed for forward plants because it combined botany with liberal politics.
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Botany, sexuality and women’s writing 1760–1830

From modest shoot to forward plant

eISBN:
9781526130174
Publisher:
Manchester University Press
Cover Botany, sexuality and women’s writing 1760–1830

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Cover Hartly House, Calcutta

Hartly House, Calcutta

Phebe Gibbes

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Publication History:

Online Publication Date:
13 Feb 2019
Subjects:
  1. Literature and Theatre
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This novel is a designedly political document. Written at the time of the Hastings impeachment and set in the period of Hastings’s Orientalist government, Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) represents a dramatic delineation of the Anglo-Indian encounter. The novel constitutes a significant intervention in the contemporary debate concerning the nature of Hastings’s rule of India by demonstrating that it was characterised by an atmosphere of intellectual sympathy and racial tolerance. Within a few decades the Evangelical and Anglicising lobbies frequently condemned Brahmans as devious beneficiaries of a parasitic priestcraft, but Phebe Gibbes’s portrayal of Sophia’s Brahman and the religion he espouses represent a perception of India dignified by a sympathetic and tolerant attempt to dispel prejudice.
Cover Crossing borders and queering citizenship

Crossing borders and queering citizenship

Civic reading practice in contemporary American and Canadian writing

Author:
Zalfa Feghali

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Publication History:

Online Publication Date:
16 Apr 2019
Subjects:
  1. Literature and Theatre
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Can reading make us better citizens? This book sheds light on how the act of reading can be mobilised as a powerful civic tool in service of contemporary civil and political struggles for minority recognition, rights, and representation in North America. Crossing borders and queering citizenship reimagines the contours of contemporary citizenship by connecting queer and citizenship theories to the idea of an engaged reading subject. This book offers a new approach to studying the act of reading, theorises reading as an integral element of the basic unit of the state: the citizen. By theorising the act of reading across borders as a civic act that queers citizenship, the book advances an alternative model of belonging through civic readerly engagement. Exploring work by seven US, Mexican, Canadian, and Indigenous authors, including Gloria Anzaldúa, Dorothy Allison, Gregory Scofield, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Erín Moure, Junot Díaz, and Yann Martel, the book offers sensitive interpretations of how reading can create citizenship practices that foreground and value recognition, rights, and representation for all members of a political system.
Cover Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson

Author:
David Brauner

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Online Publication Date:
12 Jan 2021
Subjects:
  1. Literature and Theatre
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This is a comprehensive and definitive study of the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson. It offers lucid, detailed and nuanced readings of each of Jacobson’s novels, and makes a powerful case for the importance of his work in the landscape of contemporary fiction. Focusing on the themes of comedy, masculinity and Jewishness, the book emphasises the richness and diversity of Jacobson’s work. Often described by others as ‘the English Philip Roth’ and by himself as ‘the Jewish Jane Austen’, Jacobson emerges here as a complex and often contradictory figure: a fearless novelist; a combative public intellectual; a polemical journalist; an unapologetic elitist and an irreverent outsider; an exuberant iconoclast and a sombre satirist. Never afraid of controversy, Jacobson tends to polarise readers; but, love him or hate him, he is difficult to ignore. This book gives him the thorough consideration and the balanced evaluation that he deserves.