This article examines the spatial-semantic transformations of the Victorian garden in three novels for children: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911), Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958), and Sarah Singleton’s The Poison Garden (2009). Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of “heterotopology” and Michel de Certeau’s notion of “spatial practices,” this article reconstructs the evolution of the garden from an intact pastoral setting to a sinister and alienating space. The primary concern of this article is to illustrate how this process of inversion can be read as a spatial mirroring of a gradual deconstruction of the Romantic concept of childhood.
The introduction to this volume charts the major historical and cultural transformations of medicine and mobility in nineteenth-century Britain and the ways in which they interconnect. Sandra Dinter and Sarah Schäfer-Althaus explore the professionalisation, institutionalisation, and commercialisation of medical practice and research in conjunction with the effects of the transport revolution on British national and colonial identity, class, and gender. Registering the ambiguities, contradictions, and (dis-)continuities of these processes, they identify how medicine and mobility constituted, influenced, and transformed each other. The authors subsequently survey current positions and crossovers in mobility studies and the medical humanities, demonstrating how theoretical and methodological paradigms of both fields potentially inform each other. After setting the scene, the introduction presents the three conceptual sections of the volume and summarises the individual contributions.
Kerri Andrews, Wanderers: A History of Women Walking (London: Reaktion Books, 2020), 303 pp., £14.99Nanny Kim, Mountain Rivers, Mountain Roads: Transport in Southwest China, 1700–1850 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2019), xxvi, 621 pp, €149/$179Karen Chapple and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Transit-Oriented Displacement or Community Dividends? (Cambridge, MA: Th e MIT Press, 2019), 347 pp., 67 black-and-white illustrations, $40.00
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