| Lerninhalte |
In this seminar we will look at the garden as a literary trope and a recurring symbol in British fiction. We will read three recent novels, Jim Crace’s Eden (2022), Arminatta Forna’s Happiness (2018) and Sarah Moss’s The Fell (2021), as well as a selection of shorter texts, which make use of the garden or gardening in various ways. While the enclosed, tightly regulated paradise in Eden shares characteristics of both utopia and dystopia, Forna’s novel employs urban gardens and rewilding projects in a wider context of care, exclusion and violence. Finally, Moss’s lockdown-novel shows the garden as a space both inside and outside, one that belongs neither to the private home nor to the public sphere. Read together, these texts show gardens as ‘in-between’ spaces, where the boundaries between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, inside and outside, work and leisure, safety and exposure, and home and the world, are constantly re-negotiated.
Please purchase:
- Jim Crace, Eden (2022)
- Arminatta Forna, Happiness (2018)
- Sarah Moss, The Fell (2021)
Additional material will be made available via Stud.IP. |
