Maria Graham’s Tropical Landscaping of Brazilian Independence

Authors

Keywords:

tropical landscape, picturesque, botany, Brazil, travel writing, British Imperialism, nature-culture

Abstract

This article argues that landscape is an instrument that travel writer and amateur artist and botanist Maria Graham uses to accentuate the momentous changes she witnesses during and after the Brazilian independence movement. Rather than being a background, landscape is a tool with which she inscribes the scene of Brazilian independence. Her self-awareness as a privileged British citizen leads her to champion a political movement that valorizes the mythology of innate British liberty, and landscape serves as an ideal medium through which to channel this conviction. Her 1824 Journal of a Voyage to Brazil demonstrates a way of looking at South American land that articulates a harmony between its natural and political structures; her construction of the Brazilian landscape orders it so as to align the natural and political environments. At the same time, her work bears witness to the discursive processes that forge the ever-unstable binary oppositions of nature and culture, aesthetics and politics.

Author Biography

Nicolle Jordan, University of Southern Mississippi, USA

Nicolle Jordan is an Associate Professor of British literature at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her scholarship intertwines women’s literary history, garden history, and geography, focusing on the relationship between landscape and women’s property ownership. She has published articles on Jane Barker, Anne Finch, Maria Graham, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Elizabeth Montagu, and Sarah Scott. Recent publications include “‘The China of Santa Cruz’: The Culture of Tea in Maria Graham’s Journal of a Voyage to Brazil” and “Maria Graham’s Chilean Landscape of Independence.” She is currently revising her book manuscript, Prolific Ground: Landscape and British Women’s Writing, 1690-1790.

References

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Published

2022-03-30

How to Cite

Jordan, N. (2022). Maria Graham’s Tropical Landscaping of Brazilian Independence . ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 21(1), 259–284. Retrieved from https://journals.jcu.edu.au/etropic/article/view/3835

Issue

Vol. 21 No. 1 (2022): Special Issue: Tropical Landscapes and Nature~Culture Entanglements

Section

Literary Analysis

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