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How do poets, writers and cultural critics contend with and represent the garden or their own gardening as they are changed by austerity? Gardening under austerity encompasses a diversity of places, spaces, practices, and actors: suburban allotments and zoological gardens, Victory diggers and urban foragers, human gardeners and the unruly more-than-human world. Theorizing the politics, poetics and practices of austerity gardening in twentieth and twenty-first century Anglophone cultural texts, The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times explores the variegated impact of austerity in conjunction with the representation of the garden in the national context of England in the mid-century, and how garden imagery is embedded within and illuminates the political, economic, and social contexts of literary production.
List of contents
Chapter 1. "Austerity Gardens: The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times." Naomi Milthorpe
Roots
Chapter 2. "Sissinghurst: A Fantasy of Austerity" Rebecca Nagel
Chapter 3. "Digging Up England: Subverting Austerity in Beverley Nichols's Merry Hall" Naomi Milthorpe
Plots
Chapter 4. "Narratives of Nettle: Austerity, Medicinal Flora, and the Herb Garden as a Locus of Resistance." John Charles Ryan
Chapter 5. "Gardening in the Anthropocene: Wilding, Eco-Memoir and Biodiversity." Jessica White
Chapter 6. "Zoological Gardens, Austerity and the Extinction of the 'Last' Thylacine" Katrina Schlunke and Hannah Stark
Paths
Chapter 7. "Life on Pig Row: Living with Austerity." Andrew and Carol Oldham
Chapter 8. "A Poetics of Embodied Gardening" Judy Kendall
About the Contributors
About the author
Naomi Milthorpe is senior lecturer in English at the School of Humanities of the University of Tasmania and author of Evelyn Waugh's Satire: Texts and Contexts.
Summary
The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times illuminates the ways in which the garden as a real and imagined space, and gardening as a practice or ethic, is changed under extreme conditions of economic and environmental austerity.
