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Garden Work argues that American literature's sense of form developed as part of an ongoing theoretical conversation with the field of garden design. Of particular significance to American writers was a horticultural dispute that took on a renewed sense of urgency in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: that between the garden naturalists, who crafted gardens to look like un-designed natural spaces, and the garden formalists, who crafted gardens that visually distinguish between human and wilderness sites. This dissertation identifies a literary cohort within this horticentric period--Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather--who enter into the naturalism/formalism debates via their garden journals, environmental reforms, manifestoes, and the design of their own yards and gardens. Though initially attracted to garden design for different reasons, these authors all become increasingly skeptical of the ideological assumptions behind garden naturalism and increasingly fascinated by old-fashioned traditions of formal gardening, such as Italian, French, and Colonial Revival gardens. Garden Work reveals both the impact that garden design has on America's literary history and the theoretical contributions that literature can make to garden design. On the one hand, the authors I study integrate their garden work into the narrative fabric of their most canonical texts, often at those moments when they are most self-reflective about what it means to produce formally innovative fiction that is nevertheless rooted in natural American landscapes. For these writers, garden formalism becomes central to their ability to imagine American literature in the wake of the American Renaissance. On the other hand, these authors are enabled by their expertise in the medium of prose fiction to identify new theoretical problems within and features of garden design. Specifically, their ability to articulate garden theory not in terms of a conflict between art and nature but rather as a dynamic relationship between form and content, a relationship they encounter repeatedly in their literary work, permits these authors to analyze in innovative ways the social, environmental, and aesthetic consequences of garden design. Ultimately, Garden Work uncovers the interwoven nature of America's garden history and its literary history.

This study offers additional nuance to the garden topos and trope within nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canadian women's writing and extends the critical discussion of landscape and the garden as archetype in Canadian literature. This dissertation cross-fertilizes literary analysis with garden theory, using the work of such garden historians as John Dixon Hunt, Mark Francis, and Randolph Hester. The argument emphasizes that gardens in literature, like their actual counterparts, are an art of milieu, reflective of their socio-physical contexts. Both real and textual gardens are rhetorical: their content and formal features invite interpretation. A textual garden performs similarly to an actual garden by providing a spatial frame; a means of naturalization; a vivid exemplar of growth, fertility and beauty; a mediation of the artificial and the natural; a space of paradox; and a site of social performance. / The specific focus of this study is "domestic gardens": gardens that are intimate, immediate to the home, and part of daily life. Chapter one separates the garden from archetypal models by studying the garden as an actual place (specifically, the backwoods kitchen garden) described in the works of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill. Chapter two examines how the garden influences Moodie's and Traill's writing of the "transplanted" female emigrant. Chapter three presents the bower as an important precursor to the domestic garden through Gabrielle Roy's Enchantment and Sorrow (1984) and "Garden in the Wind" (1975). Through the bower, Roy mediates the female artist's ambivalence toward home in her pursuit of independence. Chapter four explores Carol Shields' sanctification of the domestic in her fiction through the concept of paradise as both an ideal setting and a mode of being. Chapter five provides a "garden tour" of the poetry of Lorna Crozier, culminating in the garden as a model for the text itself and for the genre of palimpsest. For these writers, literal and figurative gardens are ways of "planting" their characters and personae, "plotting" their narratives, mediating social conventions, and providing an interpretative lens through which readers may perceive the texts as a whole.

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During the 17th and 18th centuries, the French garden history witnesses the triumph and then the decline of the French formal garden, to which succeeds the fashion of landscape gardening of foreign inspiration. Integrating and nourishing this debate, the literary texts of that period enable to grasp the stakes that it brings up. The garden notably lends itself to the expression of an emerging sentiment of nature, as well it also serves that of a political thought enlightened by new ideas. Effectively, the treatment that these texts give to the garden is a witness to the revival that installs itself in the way of conceiving nature, and the relation that nature holds with man and the art of the gardens. The garden's topic and scenography are a testimony of changes that in turn affect its imaginary and that of the walk. Finally, the critical discourse exploits the analogy that establishes itself between the art of the gardens and the exercise of power, polarizing the debate around the political metaphor.

Creativity, for Wallace Stevens, depends on connections to the natural world which can be examined through garden imagery. Chapters one and two focus on Stevens' private writing, identifying the range of garden environments and natural expanses to which he responded and associating these responses with his aesthetic sensibilities. Continental and Adamic traditions in garden imagery are explored as are contemporary practices in conservation and horticulture. Chapter three concentrates on poems which treat the garden as a locus amoenus of repose and delight where a poet can engage his imaginative faculties with sensual reality. Chapter four analyzes poems whose garden imagery elucidates Stevens' attempts to confront social and political as well as aesthetic issues. Chapters five and six examine Stevens' consideration of the garden as a hortus mentis, emblematic of creative experience, where Stevens assesses the relation of expression to environment and celebrates life lived "in the word of it."

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This thesis considers a selection of modern landscape poetry from an ecocritical perspective, arguing that this poetry demonstrates how the term landscape might be re-imagined in relation to contemporary environmental concerns. Each chapter discusses poetic responses to a different kind of landscape: gardens, forests, rivers and islands. Chapter One explores how, in the poetry of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Douglas Dunn, Louise Glück and David Harsent, gardens are culturally constructed landscapes in which ideas of self, society and environment are contemplated; I ask whether gardening provides a positive example of how people might interact with the natural world. My second chapter demonstrates that for Sorley MacLean, W.S. Merwin, Susan Stewart and Kathleen Jamie, forests are sites of memory and sustainable ‘dwelling', but that deforestation threatens both the ecology and the culture of these landscapes. Chapter Three compares river poems by Ted Hughes and Alice Oswald, considering their differing approaches to river sources, mystical immersion in nature, water pollution and poetic experimentation; I discuss how in W.S. Graham's poetry the sea provides a complex image of the phenomenal world similar to Oswald's river. The final chapter examines the extent to which islands in poetry are pastoral landscapes and environmental utopias, looking in particular at poems by Dunn, Robin Robertson, Iain Crichton Smith and Jen Hadfield. I reflect upon the potential for island poetry to embrace narratives of globalisation as well as localism, and situate the work of George Mackay Brown and Robert Alan Jamieson within this context. I engage with a range of ecocritical positions in my readings of these poets and argue that the linguistic creativity, formal inventiveness and self-reflexivity of poetry constitute a distinctive contribution to contemporary understandings of landscape and the environment.