Introduction

This chapter explores the prominent and diverse ways public greens materialize in modern literature and culture, as we simultaneously regard the very concepts of public, green, and modern to be terms for investigation, ones often made more capacious and often wily through the study of the spatial, social, and verbal texts. The authors, and the texts they analyze, often deploy “green” and “nature” in ways that activate multiple definitions and valences of these terms, a critical gesture that is necessary when studying a cultural moment and body texts that themselves resist any unified or stable definition of either word. A reader exploring the greens that follow should therefore note that she is on intentionally rugged ground as “the green” and its attendant lexicon are not used symmetrically or evenly across chapters. While Kuster explores the representation and marketing of London parks in Tube advertisements of the twenties and thirties.