Radford P. Savages latest work, Poetic Gardens is a collection of over 50 writings about life, faith, family and love as he shares the personal significance of each work and offers readers an opportunity to share their beliefs on what these principles mean to them.

"Beginning with Cicero and Varro and ending with Statius and Pliny the Younger, this chapter offers a chronological investigation of the ways in which real and literary gardens developed from the first century BCE to the first century CE as a means of elite masculine self-representation and the reactions of elite Roman men to the increased social and cultural power of villa and horti estates and their grounds. Gardens served as powerful symbols of wealth and as creative displays of the cultural aspirations of their owners in ways that challenged traditional definitions of gardens and of Roman manliness. Since these large-scale 'gardens' are primarily associated with leisure (otium), authors are concerned with describing and justifying their activities in these sites as befitting Roman masculine ideals. We can trace a change in attitude towards leisure and the private display of wealth, and consequently gardens, largely attributed to changes in the socio-political circumstances of the Roman elite, in the works of Statius and his contemporary Pliny the Younger, who use laudatory descriptions of extensive villas and grounds as a means of expressing social and literary power"--

In What Gardens Mean, Stephanie Ross draws on philosophy as well as the histories of art, gardens, culture, and ideas to explore the magical lure of gardens. Paying special attention to the amazing landscape gardens of eighteenth-century England, she situates gardening among the other fine arts, documenting the complex messages gardens can convey and tracing various connections between gardens and the art of painting. What Gardens Mean offers a distinctive blend of historical and contemporary material, ranging from extensive accounts of famous eighteenth-century gardens to incisive connections with present-day philosophical debates. And while Ross examines aesthetic writings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including Joseph Addison’s Spectator essays on the pleasures of imagination, the book’s opening chapter surveys more recent theories about the nature and boundaries of art. She also considers gardens on their own terms, following changes in garden style, analyzing the phenomenal experience of viewing or strolling through a garden, and challenging the claim that the art of gardening is now a dead one. (ed.)

Russia possesses one of the richest and most admired literatures of Europe, reaching back to the eleventh century. A History of Russian Literature provides a comprehensive account of Russian writing from its earliest origins in the monastic works of Kiev up to the present day, still rife with the creative experiments of post-Soviet literary life. The volume proceeds chronologically in five parts, extending from Kievan Rus' in the 11th century to the present day.The coverage strikes a balance between extensive overview and in-depth thematic focus. Parts are organized thematically in chapters, which a number of keywords that are important literary concepts that can serve as connecting motifs and 'case studies', in-depth discussions of writers, institutions, and texts that take the reader up close and. Visual material also underscores the interrelation of the word and image at a number of points, particularly significant in the medieval period and twentieth century. The History addresses major continuities and discontinuities in the history of Russian literature across all periods, and in particular bring out trans-historical features that contribute to the notion of a national literature. The volume's time-range has the merit of identifying from the early modern period a vital set of national stereotypes and popular folklore about boundaries, space, Holy Russia, and the charismatic king that offers culturally relevant material to later writers. This volume delivers a fresh view on a series of key questions about Russia's literary history, by providing new mappings of literary history and a narrative that pursues key concepts (rather more than individual authorial careers). This holistic narrative underscores the ways in which context and text are densely woven in Russian literature, and demonstrates that the most exciting way to understand the canon and the development of tradition is through a discussion of the interrelation of major and minor figures, historical events and literary politics, literary theory and literary innovation.

This book draws attention to the pervasive artistic rivalry between Elizabethan poetry and gardens in order to illustrate the benefits of a trans-media approach to the literary culture of the period. In its blending of textual studies with discussions of specific historical patches of earth, The Poem and the Garden demonstrates how the fashions that drove poetic invention were as likely to be influenced by a popular print convention or a particular garden experience as they were by the formal genres of the classical poets. By moving beyond a strictly verbal approach in its analysis of creative imitation, this volume offers new ways of appreciating the kinds of comparative and competitive methods that shaped early modern poetics. Noting shared patterns—both conceptual and material—in these two areas not only helps explain the persistence of botanical metaphors in sixteenth-century books of poetry but also offers a new perspective on the types of contrastive illusions that distinguish the Elizabethan aesthetic. With its interdisciplinary approach, The Poem and the Garden is of interest to all students and scholars who study early modern poetics, book history, and garden studies.

Major authors investigated include Chaucer, Blake, Romains, Pynchon, and Prigogine.

Inspiration and practical advice for a fantastic garden. Kim Smith's passion is her garden, a small and densely-packed quarter acre beside her family's seaside home in Gloucester, brimming with every species imaginable and some (including apricots) a few might consider unimaginable. Here she has created a living tapestry of fragrance, foliage, flower and fruit. She is sensitive to the plant's forms, hues, and horticultural demands, and has, by design, established a succession of blooms and a selection of plant materials that reduce the needs for pesticides and herbicides. Any gardener wrestling with the challenges of blight, bugs, poor soil, limited light, and the vagaries of weather will find in these pages both sound advice and practical solutions. But this is intended as more than another how-to book. The author is especially interested in the intangibles a garden provides: the moods and ambiance, the butterflies attracted, the harmonious patterns of color, light, and texture. Her advice is as much about how to visualize a garden, as about particular trees, shrubs, vines, perennials, and annuals. Illustrated in full color with the author's own exquisite drawings, containing twenty-two chapters that illuminate every aspect of garden planning and planting, this book is for gardeners seeking both sensible guidance and extraordinary design ideas.

W. B. Yeats and Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) regarded style as a tool for metaphysical inquiry and, consequently, they adopted distinct poetic styles to convey different attitudes towards experience. Silva-McNeill's study examines how the poets' stylistic diversification was a means of rehearsing different existential and aesthetic stances. It identifies parallels between their styles from a comparative case studies approach. Their stylistic masks allowed them to maintain the subjectivity and authenticity associated with the lyrical genre, while simultaneously attaining greater objectivity and conveying multiple perspectives. The poets continuously transformed the fond and form of their verse, creating a protean lyrical voice that expressed their multilateral poetic temperament and reflected the depersonalisation and formal experimentalism of the modern lyric.

Jewish writing has only recently begun to be recognized as a major cultural phenomenon in Latin American literature. Nevertheless, the majority of students and even Latin American literary specialists, remain uninformed about this significant body of writing. This Dictionary is the first comprehensive bibliographical and critical source book on Latin American Jewish literature. It represents the research efforts of 50 scholars from the United States, Latin America, and Israel who are dedicated to the advancement of Latin American Jewish studies. An introduction by the editor is followed by entries on 118 authors that provide both biographical information and a critical summary of works. Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico-home to the largest Jewish communities in Latin America-are the countries with the greatest representation, but there are essays on writers from Venezuela, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Cuba.

Individual essays discuss Byzantine conceptions of paradise, the textual evidence for monastic horticulture, animal and game parks, herbs in medicinal pharmacy, and the famous illustrated copy of Dioskorides's herbal manual in Vienna. An opening chapter explores questions and observations from the point of view of a non-Byzantine garden historian, and the closing chapter suggests possible directions for future scholarship in the field.