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This essay uses the example of the Chinese tree peony, a flower much desired by British gardeners at the start of the nineteenth century as well as a flower much reproduced in horticultural periodicals and on consumer commodities, to explain the era's interconnected understanding of the process of cultivation. Organic cultivations, foreign and domestic, were not separated from social and personal cultivations in verbal and visual discourse but rather mutually reinforced each other. Following these connections helps explain the ever-growing estrangement between nineteenth-century subjects and the nature that surrounded them in terms that connect environmental, aesthetic, and literary history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing numbers of women journalists entering the profession in the early twentieth century provoked mixed reactions from contemporary novelists. Responses evolved from cheering on a doughty pioneer to questioning whether women's presence in the mass print media was helping reform the status of women or reinforcing gender stereotypes. Little is known about the personal struggles of women journalists in the early years of the popular press. In the absence of plentiful data, the study of novels and short stories, many of them semi-autobiographical and written by men and women working in the early twentieth-century newspaper industry, combined with analysis of previously un-studied memoirs and early guides for women journalists, illuminate the obstacles—and opportunities—experienced by these pioneers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A flurry of scholarly interest in Burmese legal history occurred between 1882 and 1885. Before 1882 it had been assumed that Burma had its own distinctive, Buddhist, legal tradition. A new theory was announced: that Burmese Law was a late offshoot of the Sanskrit legal literature typified by Manusmrti. I shall argue that the new theory was not supported by persuasive evidence. The new theory, I suggest, partook less of scholarship and more of propaganda in support of the annexation of Upper Burma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]