Constructing Locality: rooting nineteenth-century British novels in garden culture

Abstract

Constructing Locality: Rooting Nineteenth-Century British Novels in Garden Culture uncovers how the garden influenced the nineteenth-century novelistic imagination. The literary garden was an oft-used tool for novelists to consider how the century’s ecological and social alterations transformed the identities of Britons’ living amongst such change, with Wells’ The Time Machine, for instance, theorizing the long-term biological effects of pollution and climate engineering schemes. Building on Franco Moretti and Patrick Parrinder’s arguments that the novel was essential to the development of nations, along with historian Anne Helmreich’s argument that the garden was an essential component to the formation of nineteenth-century English identity, this project contributes to novel studies and environmental humanities by focusing on novelistic gardens like Wells’ ☐ Constructing Locality offers two contributions to these conversations. First, it argues that the garden was one of the most effective tools for novelists to consider the formation of national identities, adding to the discourse linking the novel to the rise of the modern nation state. It does so through its second contribution: expanding literary approaches of the garden past its focus on symbolism to the garden’s ecological and material components, reading novels’ representations of gardens alongside the physical gardens, catalogues, periodicals, and designs that inspired them. Specifically, it shows how the garden’s different physical arrangements enable characters to construct and engage with different forms of place—bounded spaces that fix identity at both personal and national levels. ☐ This project is divided into five chapters that consider how characters engage with their sense of place—escorting in Burney and Eliot, improving in Austen and Oliphant, historicizing in Scott, uprooting in Edgeworth and Trollope, and glassing over in Wells. In these readings, this project considers the different ways novelistic gardens establish place and, with that, shape identities; such readings reveal how characters either create their own sense of place or the place of others to ensure their fellow characters adhere to a prescribed gender, national, or class identity. Ultimately, Constructing Locality reveals the crucial role gardens played in establishing the novel as one of the most pervasive and influential literary forms of the nineteenth century.