Thesis ID: CBB001567535

The World in a Book: Robert John Thornton's “Temple of Flora” (1797--1812) (2013)

unapi

Mollendorf, Miranda Andrea (Author)


Browne, E. Janet
Richardson, Sarah
Canales, Jimena
Harvard University
Browne, E. Janet
Richardson, Sarah
Canales, Jimena


Publication Date: 2013
Edition Details: Advisor: Browne, Janet E; Committee Members: Richardson, Sarah, Canales, Jimena.
Physical Details: 324 pp.
Language: English

I argue in my dissertation that Robert John Thornton's (1768?-1837) Temple of Flora (folio 1799-1807, quarto 1812), also entitled "The Universal Empire of Love," represents personified botanical flowers of the British Empire in a colonial microcosm where anthropomorphic plants are allegorized as Europe's others. This book was a collectible item with plates issued in a series of subscriptions, which were always bound in different combinations so that no two copies were ever the same--a book that depicts a metamorphic view of nature through a series of alterations made to the individual plates, which reflects the diversity of exotic and familiar territories in the world and the mysteries within it. Thornton chose plants, flower symbolism, and landscape backgrounds "with scenery appropriated to their subject," to encapsulate the universe as a series of botanical scenes of exotic and familiar territories of Britain's past and present, and this botanical world includes four continents of the world symbolically represented as women through the relationship between image and text, the diversity of people and naturalia within these territories, and the passage of historical and chronological time. The Temple of Flora is a textual space that involves strategies of possessing and knowing nature through the collection and conquest of plants that represent the colonial inhabitants of the British Empire ensconced in their territories and collected by wealthy Britons as a miniature colonial and exotic world bound between two covers.

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Description Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 75/02(E), Aug 2014. Proquest Document ID: 1465060043.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001567535/

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Authors & Contributors
Overhoff, Jürgen
Sagal, Anna Katerina
Musgrave, Toby
Hartendorf-Wallach, Bregtje
Vermij, Rienk H.
Test, Edward McLean
Concepts
Science and literature
Nature and its relationship to culture; human-nature relationships
Natural history
Nature
Botany
Scientific illustration
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
17th century
20th century
16th century
Places
Great Britain
England
United States
Americas
Netherlands
Atlantic world
Institutions
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
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