Rural self-placing: history and narrative in the modern country garden

Walters, Harriet (2023). Rural self-placing: history and narrative in the modern country garden. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

This thesis examines the country gardens of a series of artists and writers working in the early twentieth century, arguing that the making of gardens, and the making of modern art, were reciprocal processes informed by a deep cultural need to self-place in rural English landscape. Studying garden sites alongside texts, visual and sculptural artefacts, and personal papers, I suggest that gardens can be read as making narratives that place individuals within a wider cultural and geographical landscape: as making “garden histories” that metaphorically reappraise and literally remodel traditional English landscapes for the twentieth century. Across five chapters, I study five figures who made distinct contributions to the arts: horticulturalist Gertrude Jekyll, Art Nouveau Artist Mary Watts, literary impressionist Ford Madox Ford, painter Dora Carrington, and modernist Sylvia Townsend Warner, unpacking a broad range of responses to English landscape, and demonstrating the exceptional relevance of the English country garden to a varied set of distinct modern arts. Despite the variety of gardens (and the variety of responses to English landscape) uncovered, the shared recourse to the narrative capacity of gardens—to the way gardens seemed to offer a way to imagine oneself back into the history—offers an exciting glimpse into a so-far understudied context for twentieth-century literature, where the country garden is understood as integral to modern innovation. In my demonstration of the cultural relevance of the country garden, I draw on a range of allied critical contexts from literary and art history, and emphasise the need to draw on garden historical methodologies to provide appropriately considered garden criticism within literary disciplines. Such methodological strategies offer much needed diversification to literary critical approaches to landscape: further challenging critical dichotomies between rural and modern; expanding the timelines by which modern rural art-making is approached; and calling for further study to populate the twentieth-century garden landscape.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):