The Botanical Imagination of Naturalist Literature in the Americas

本项目分析了1880年至1915年间创作的跨美洲自然主义小说中植物学语言与定居者身份之间的关系。这包括来自拉丁美洲的八位小说家的作品：Eugenio Cambaceres，Federico Gamboa，Clorinda Matto de Turner和Manuel Zeno Gandia，以及美国：杰克伦敦，威拉凯瑟，凯特肖邦和弗兰克诺里斯。自从欧洲人在新大陆探险的早期，自然科学家们就调查了美洲的植物群，并制作了植物学插图。这些插图是一种新兴的科学分类主义的一部分，这种科学分类主义试图对自然世界进行分类，其根源最近的学术研究位于西班牙美洲（Safier，Canizares-Esguerra）。这个项目更进一步，证明了植物群的殖民视觉化在世纪之交的美洲自然主义文学作品中有来世。我认为，这些小说中发现的植物隐喻是一种重要的形式的图像为欧洲裔美国人和克里奥尔精英，文学认同与植物的生命需要一种心理形式播种自己到土地上，并有一个人的焦虑减轻和归属确认协会与自然世界的进程。这个项目重新调整了文学自然主义作为一个运动的主流理解。美洲的自然主义被广泛理解为直接模仿法国小说家埃米尔·左拉的作品。然而，科学发展的时代（由亚历山大冯洪堡和查尔斯达尔文等美洲旅行者推动）塑造了左拉的思想，这本身就是新世界殖民遭遇的产物。因此，虽然美国形式的文学自然主义可能直接起源于左拉，但追溯左拉的起源不可避免地会将我们带回美洲。通过阅读自然主义小说中的植物隐喻以及早期殖民地使用的植物意象，本研究拒绝了这种意象是欧洲思想线性传播的一部分的暗示，而是表明美国文学自然主义的植物想象是更长的跨大陆交流历史的一部分。

This project analyses the relationship between the language of botany and settler identity in trans-American naturalist fiction written between 1880 and 1915. This includes works by eight novelists from Latin America: Eugenio Cambaceres, Federico Gamboa, Clorinda Matto de Turner and Manuel Zeno Gandia, and the U.S.: Jack London, Willa Cather, Kate Chopin and Frank Norris. Since the earliest days of European exploration in the New World natural scientists have surveyed American flora and produced botanical illustrations. These illustrations were part of an emerging scientific empiricism which sought to classify the natural world, the roots of which recent scholarship has located in Spanish America (Safier, Canizares-Esguerra). This project goes a step further by demonstrating that colonial visualisations of flora had an afterlife in literary works of naturalism in the Americas around the turn of the century. I argue that the botanical metaphors found in these novels are a significant form of imagery for Euro-Americans and the creole elite, and that literary identification with plant life entails a psychological form of sowing oneself into the land, and of having one's anxieties alleviated and belonging validated by association with the processes of the natural world.In retracing the origins of botanical imagery, this project realigns the dominant understanding of literary naturalism as a movement. Naturalism of the Americas is widely understood as directly modelled on the works of French novelist Émile Zola. However, the era of scientific development (driven by such travellers to the Americas as Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin) which shaped Zola's ideas were themselves the products of colonial encounters in the New World. Therefore, whilst American forms of literary naturalism may have their immediate origins in Zola, tracing Zola's origins inevitably leads us back to the Americas. By reading the botanical metaphors present in naturalist fiction alongside earlier colonial uses of botanical imagery, this research rejects the implication that such imagery was part of a linear transmission of European ideas, suggesting instead that the botanical imagination of American literary naturalism is part of a much longer history of transcontinental exchanges.