Plants and literature
Subtitle: essays in critical plant studies
By: edited by Randy Laist
Series: Critical plant studies: philosophy, literature, culture -- 1; Critical plant studies -- 1.
Publisher: Editions Rodopi
Published: 2013
Place of publication: Amsterdam
Language: eng
Number of pages: 270
ISBN-13: 9789042037489; 9781306315548
Subjects: Plants in literature
Description: "Myth, art, literature, film, and other discourses are replete with depictions of evil plants, salvific plants, and human-plant hybrids. In various ways, these representations intersect with "deep-rooted" insecurities about the place of human beings in the natural world, the relative viability of animalian motility and heterotrophy as evolutionary strategies, as well as the identity of organic life as such. Plants surprise us by combining the appearance of harmlessness and familiarity with an underlying strangeness. The otherness of vegetal life poses a challenge to our ethical, philosophical, and existential categories and tests the limits of human empathy and imagination. At the same time, the resilience of plants, their adaptability, and their integration with their habitat are a perennial source of inspiration and wisdom. Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies examines the manner in which literary texts and other cultural products express our multifaceted relationship with the vegetable kingdom. The range of perspectives brought to bear on the subject of plant life by the various authors and critics represented in this volume comprise a novel vision of ecological interdependence and stimulate a revitalized sensitivity to the relationships we share with our photosynthetic brethren."--Amazon.com.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The progress of vegetation: subversion and vegetarianism in Mansfield Park; title: Plants and the problem of authority in the antebellum U.S. South; title: Temptation of fruit: the symbolism of fruit in Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" and in the works of D.G. Rossetti and J. E. Millais; title: This is your brain on wheat: the psychology of the speculator in Frank Norris' The Pit; title: Refusing form: a reading of art, Americanism, and feminism through plant imagery in Susan Glaspell's The Verge; title: Surviving the city: resistance and plant life in Woolf's Jacob's Room and Barnes' Nightwood; title: The smell of cottonwood leaves: plants and Tayo's Healing in Silko's Ceremony; title: The Bible's paradise and Oryx and Crake's paradice: a comparison of the relationships between humans and nature; title: Iconic/ironic greenery: the cultural cultivation of plants in Brecht Evens' The Making Of; title: A return to transcendentalism in the twentieth century: emerging plant-sympathy in The Little Shop of Horrors; title: Mean green machine: how the ecological politics of Alan Moore's Reimagination of Swamp Thing brought eco-consciousness to comics; title: Reproducing plant bodies on the Great Plains.