Free Download Jane Desmarais, "Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present"
English | ISBN: 1780239750 | 2018 | 256 pages | PDF | 20 MB
Monsters under Glass explores our enduring fascination with hothouses and exotic blooms, from their rise in ancient times, through the Victorian vogue for plant collecting, to the vegetable monsters of twentieth-century science fiction and the movies, comics, and video games of the present day. Our interest in hothouses can be traced back to the Roman emperor Tiberius, but it was only in the early nineteenth century that a boom in exotic plant collecting and new glasshouse technologies stimulated the imagination of novelists, poets, and artists, and the hothouse entered the creative language in a highly charged way. Decadent writers in England and Europe-including Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde-transformed the hothouse from a functional object to a powerful metaphor of metropolitan life, sexuality, and being replete with a dark underside of decay and death; and of consciousness itself, nurtured and dissected under glass.