The Botanical Imagination of Naturalist Literature in the Americas

这个项目分析了1880年至1915年间创作的跨美自然主义小说中植物学语言和定居者身份之间的关系。其中包括来自拉丁美洲的八位小说家的作品：尤金尼奥·坎巴塞雷斯、费德里科·甘博阿、克洛琳达·马托·德特纳和曼努埃尔·泽诺·甘迪亚，以及美国的杰克·伦敦、威拉·凯瑟、凯特·肖邦和弗兰克·诺里斯。自欧洲在新大陆进行探索的最早时期起，自然科学家就对美国的植物区系进行了调查，并制作了植物学插图。这些插图是试图对自然世界进行分类的新兴科学经验主义的一部分，最近的学术研究的根源是西班牙美洲(Safier，Canizares-Esguera)。这个项目更进一步，展示了殖民地对植物群的可视化在世纪之交前后的美洲自然主义文学作品中产生了来世。我认为，这些小说中的植物隐喻对欧美人和克里奥尔精英来说是一种重要的意象形式，文学上对植物生命的认同需要一种心理形式，即把自己播种到土地上，通过与自然世界的过程相联系来缓解焦虑和确认自己的归属感。在追溯植物意象的起源时，这个项目重新调整了对文学自然主义作为一种运动的主导理解。美洲的自然主义被广泛理解为直接借鉴法国小说家埃米尔·左拉的作品。然而，形成左拉思想的科学发展时代(由亚历山大·冯·洪堡和查尔斯·达尔文等美洲旅行者推动)本身就是新大陆殖民遭遇的产物。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将我们带回美洲。通过阅读自然主义小说中出现的植物隐喻，以及早期殖民时期使用的植物意象，这项研究驳斥了这样的暗示，即这些意象是欧洲思想线性传播的一部分，相反，这表明美国文学自然主义的植物学想象是更长的跨洲交流历史的一部分。

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.