Resumen de The Uses of Fruit: Literary Symbolism and Technological Change in the Long Eighteenth Century
This article explores the representation of fruit in English literary texts from the long eighteenth century, showing how writers responded to developments in horticultural technology to diversify the symbolic associations of fruit derived from biblical and classical sources. The dichotomy of native and foreign produce that characterised the georgic poetry of the early eighteenth century was increasingly displaced by oppositions of hardy, natural and wholesome orchard fruits and delicate, unnatural and unhealthy exotic fruits. In the Romantic period novel the representation of fruit draws on the discourse of luxury so that tropical fruit is used to connote the extravagance of new money but also effeminacy and the disruption of the patriarchal order.
