Reviewed by:

• The Language of Fruit: Literature and Horticulture in the Long Eighteenth Century by Liz Bellamy
• Anna K. Sagal (bio)

The Language of Fruit caught my attention right from the title, and this book has remained with me in profound ways since I finished reading it. Liz Bellamy incorporates an ambitious array of horticultural texts, agricultural treatises, poems, plays, and novels into a nuanced discussion of the significance of fruit throughout English literary history. The title claims the monograph is limited to the long eighteenth century, but with chapters that centralize Greco-Roman mythology, biblical tradition, medieval poetry, and early modern horticultural texts, the title is somewhat misleading. Throughout, Bellamy demonstrates her facility with close reading and analysis across genres, producing a volume that is enjoyable and insightful in equal measure.

Bellamy begins with a goal that appeals to any scholar of ecocriticism or critical plant studies: “to discourse with fruit trees, understand their language, and recognize how they communicate with our inward sense” (1). What unfolds in the following chapters manages to deftly “discourse” with the history of fruit representation throughout literature while retaining [End Page 311] this original sense of wonder. In lively prose, Bellamy escorts her readers through the complex and often contradictory legacy of fruit in literature. Encompassing everything from class and socio-economic status to gender and sexuality, fruit can be deployed to represent any number of critical anxieties, political interests, or economic designs.

Bellamy’s interdisciplinary project reminds us that, “as a natural product of human intervention that is freighted with symbolic associations, fruit subverts unproblematic binary oppositions of nature and art, agriculture and industry, and nature and culture that have been articulated in some ecocritical theory” (8). In many ways, The Language of Fruit challenges certain assumptions of ecocritical theory as it productively expands the limits of how we can look to nature and individual biota like apples, oranges, and pineapples to inform our understanding of literature and society in the past. Bellamy rightly notes that most research and criticism on plants in the eighteenth century and prior have centralized flowers, whereas her innovative investment in fruit showcases the unique ways in which these particular plants—as intrinsically consumable—makes more apparent the linkages between plants and sexuality. Given the popularity of fruit references in literature (the ubiquity of which I had never realized until reading Bellamy’s careful study), we have much to learn about both the socio-cultural significance of these plants and the extent to which their agricultural development influenced society over time.

Chapter 1’s focus on fruit in biblical and classical tradition grounds the dazzling analysis of subsequent chapters. This section discusses the Tree of Knowledge, but also encompasses a broader selection of texts inspired by Genesis, as well as the Song of Solomon, and the Old and New Testaments more extensively. In fact, Bellamy touches on everything from Egyptian wall painting to the Eclogues of Virgil to provide a thorough survey of the complex ways in which fruit came to signify a seemingly contradictory range of ideas and concepts that allowed various biota to be used representationally for multiple critical purposes in English literature.

The second chapter combines these classical and biblical fruit associations with horticultural manuals to highlight the ongoing influence of cultural tropes on agricultural descriptions. Referring to early modern sources including Gervase Markham’s The English Husbandman (1613) and William Lawson’s A New Orchard and Garden (1618), Bellamy guides readers through a survey of horticultural texts both recognizable and relatively obscure to a non-specialist. Her analysis is especially successful with reference to the ambiguous overlaps between orchards and gardens in the early modern period, and how such seemingly similar horticultural spaces often conveyed distinct cultural and literary associations.

The third chapter brings a fresh perspective to the diversity of approaches to understanding the role of nature in seventeenth-century pastoral poetry. Beginning with a meticulous reading of Ben Jonson’s [End Page 312] Penshurst (1616), Bellamy proceeds to pull ideas from garden history, ecocritical readings...

审核人：

• 水果的语言：十八世纪以来的文学与园艺作者：莉兹·贝拉米（Liz Bellamy）
• 安娜·K·萨加尔（生物）

《水果的语言》一书名就引起了我的注意，自从我读完这本书以来，这本书就以深刻的方式陪伴着我。莉兹·贝拉米（Liz Bellamy）将雄心勃勃的园艺文本，农业论文，诗歌，戏剧和小说融入到整个英语文学史中对水果意义的细微讨论中。标题称专着仅限于18世纪，但其章节集中了希腊罗马神话，圣经传统，中世纪诗歌和早期现代园艺文字，因此标题有些误导。在整个过程中，贝拉米都通过对各种流派的仔细阅读和分析来展示自己的设施，并在同等程度上获得了令人愉悦和深刻的见解。

贝拉米的目标是吸引任何生态批评或批判植物研究的学者：“与果树对话，理解果树的语言，并认识果树如何与我们的内在意识进行交流”（1）。接下来几章中的内容设法在整个文献中巧妙地“论述”了水果表征的历史，同时保留了[End Page 311]这种原始的奇观。贝拉米在生动活泼的散文中，陪伴她的读者们了解文学作品中复杂而又相互矛盾的遗产。涵盖从阶级和社会经济地位到性别和性行为的所有内容，可以部署水果来代表许多严重的焦虑，政治利益或经济设计。

贝拉米的跨学科项目提醒我们，“作为人类干预的一种自然产物，它充满了象征性的联想，它颠覆了自然界，艺术，农业和工业以及自然界和文化在某些生态批判理论中所表达的毫无问题的二元对立”（ 8）。在许多方面，水果的语言挑战生态批判理论的某些假设，因为它有效地扩大了我们如何看待自然和单个生物区系（如苹果，橘子和菠萝）的局限性，从而使我们对过去的文学和社会有所了解。贝拉米正确地指出，十八世纪及以前的大多数植物研究和批评都集中了鲜花，而她对水果的创新投资则展示了这些特殊植物的独特方式，这些特定植物作为内在消耗品，使植物与性之间的联系更加明显。鉴于水果参考文献在文学中的普及（在阅读贝拉米的仔细研究之前，我从未意识到过这种参考文献的普遍性），

第1章着重于圣经和古典传统中的水果，这为后续各章的令人眼花analysis乱的分析奠定了基础。本节讨论了知识树，但也涵盖了更多受创世纪启发的经文选集，以及所罗门之歌和旧约和新约圣经。实际上，贝拉米涉及到从埃及壁画到维吉尔历险记的所有内容，以彻底调查水果的复杂方式，以表明似乎相互矛盾的思想和观念范围，从而使各种生物群系可被代表性地用于多种批评。英语文学中的目的。

第二章将这些经典和圣经的水果联想与园艺手册结合起来，以强调文化比喻对农业描述的持续影响。贝拉米（Bellamy）提到了早期现代资料，包括Gervase Markham的《英国丈夫》（The English Husbandman，1613）和William Lawson的《新果园和花园》（A New Orchard and Garden，1618）。关于现代早期果园和花园之间模棱两可的重叠以及这种看似相似的园艺空间通常如何传达独特的文化和文学联系，她的分析尤其成功。

第三章为理解自然在十七世纪田园诗中的作用的方法的多样性提供了崭新的视角。从仔细阅读本·琼森（Ben Jonson）的[结束第312页] 彭斯赫斯特（Penshurst）（1616）开始，贝拉米开始从园林史，生态批判性读物中汲取灵感。