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These scholarly essays present the rose symbol in broad cultural, social, and historical contexts ranging from astrology to Catholic history to the present-day movement against FGM. Appealing to students in a variety of disciplines, chapters look at the rose in Southern Indian Tamil culture, Vietnam, China, Ireland, and more. Contributors include Albert Amao, Lisa Cucciniello, Gamze Demirel, Ryan Dunne, Vickie TuongVi Eaton, Frankie Hutton, Maria Jaschok, Monika Joshi, Tobe Levin, Michael Price, Yaping Qian, Uma M. Swaminathan, Montgomery Taylor.

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Endorsement for the Mandarin edition
 

ROSE LORE By Maria Jaschok

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‘ ...in a literary world where the rose is seen archetypally, all things have human form’ so says Hazard Adams. As the rose allows itself to be anthropomorphized, it allows us thus to breathe human meaning into a nonhuman part of the physical world that may be considered our common heritage. Firmly anchored in a shared and idealized imaginary without the artificial borders and demarcations that separate humanity, our common heritage, we might argue, also expands. The rich and multifaceted manifestations of human creativity – a creativity which has enabled women and men of different ages and places to mythologize, name, interpret, classify, sensualize and also, and here lies moral ambiguity, consume the rose – are beautifully illustrated in the varied contributions to this anthology. The ROSE LORE assembles a seductive tapestry of cross-cultural richness and discovery. When individual contributors speak to the object of the rose in diverse discursive and sociocultural contexts, they are addressing important parts of themselves, allowing us, the readers, thereby the discovery of our own natures.
 
Yet whilst the rose as the universe’s ‘quintessential archetypal flower’ may be seen as a fundamental symbol of the Jungian Collective Unconscious, immediately recognizable as a universal representation of beauty and perfection, the writings provide testimony to the poignancy of Difference and Otherness. The rose lore of beauty and perfection, moreover, is pervaded by a lore which speaks of dissonances and ambiguities engendered by injustice, inequality and outright destruction. As intimation of the loss of human innocence, ‘the sick rose’ becomes thus a potent, multifaceted symbol, mirroring the complexities of our interdependent and ever-conflicted world.
 
Sensitively translated from the original English into Chinese, the participants in this wonderful project of translation are to be congratulated for making this revised anthology accessible to Chinese readers. It gains greatly from a new preface and three chapters from South India, Viet Nam, and China.
 
Dr. Maria Jaschok
 
University of Oxford
 
“...a splendid rendering of diverse aspects of the rose, like we’ve never seen it before.” Xinyu ‘Lulu’ Jin, Co-Founder, Global I-Ching Association, New York.