Flowers in world literature
The St Petersburg University Representative Office in Spain warmly invites you to an online lecture Flowers in world literature. The lecture will be given by Svetlana Gorbovskaya, Doctor of Philological Sciences, Associate Professor of the French Language Department at SPbU.
Images of flowers have accompanied world literature since its inception. In terms of frequency of use and diversity, floral imagery can only be compared to images related to the world of fauna.
Flowers are presented in literature in two main capacities: firstly, as real flowers, telling the reader about the traditions of gardening, wreath making, bouquet making, the nuances of botany and herbaria. Flowers are also allegorical or metaphysical, being an iconic symbol, a metonymy, a metaphor, a component of metamorphosis or a part of a rhetorical figure.
During our lecture we will talk about the most common literary flowers found in both ancient and modern literature. We will learn about florilegiums, talk about authors' floral images and learn to understand the "language of flowers".
Lecturer
Svetlana Gorbovskaya, Doctor of Philology, Associate Professor of the French Language Department at SPbU, is the author of the monographs "Floral Imagery in Nineteenth-Century French Literature" (SPbU, 2017), "The Many-Faced Abyss: Formation of a New Paradigm of the Plant Image in Nineteenth-Century French Literature" (Nestor-History, 2021), and "Inspired by the Rose" (SPbU, 2023).
The lecture will be streamed online in Russian with simultaneous translation into Spanish as part of the celebration of the 300th anniversary of SPbU - Russia's first university.