The Cambridge Handbook of Literature and Plants
The Cambridge Handbook of Literature and Plants
$120.00
USDThe first of its kind, this wide-ranging, accessible handbook covers literary engagement with plants in over two thousand years of writing from around the world. It includes within its broad ambit historical periods of Latin, Norse and Anglophone plant literatures, prominent plant genres, and the literatures of major global regions. Chapters explore the history of literary thinking about plants as creatures that do or do not resemble us; our use of plants to negotiate geo-political conflict; the ethical dimension of plant sensibilities; the moral dimension of our desire to engage aesthetically with plants; the ways in which human-plant relations have been used to make and unmake national and ethnic identities; the role of plant-writing in the development of literary form; and the ways we have used plants to navigate modernity's cultural and intellectual shift from theological engagement with the created world to the discourses of modern science.
- A wide-ranging, interdisciplinary account containing insight for historians and literary scholars from a broad range of backgrounds
- Valuable as a resource for both research and pedagogy, providing broad geographical and chronological coverage
- Unique in structure, with sections that focus on particular plant species of long-standing relevance to specific global regions, as well as histories focused on plants as both cultural, political and ethnic objects and as literary tropes
Product details
February 2025Hardback
9781108837736
406 pages
229 × 152 × 24 mm
0.765kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Part I. Historical Periods:
- 1. The ancient world: us and them Rebecca Armstrong
- 2. Inspective fruits: plants in early Christian literature Clare Lapraik Guest
- 3. Plant lives in the literatures of medieval England Michael Bintley
- 4. Plant-lore in the botanical renaissance: grafting myth and science Todd Borlik
- 5. Literary plants, 18th – 19th century Stephen Bending
- 6. Portraits of plants, 19th – 20th century Claudia Tobin
- Part II. Anglophone Literary Forms:
- 7. Useful books: herbals and gardening manuals Jessica M. Rosenberg
- 8. Shakespeare's plants then and now Bonnie Lander Johnson
- 9. Metaphysical subjects and cavalier objects in 17th century plant lyric Robert N. Watson
- 10. Speculative fiction and the contemporary novel T. S. Miller
- 11. Aftermath: thinking and healing with grass in contemporary poetry Holly Corfield Carr
- Part III. Global Regions:
- 12. Plants in the French and Francophone literary tradition Giulia Pacini
- 13. Early American plant writing Michael Ziser
- 14. Plants in the literatures of Latin America and the Caribbean Lesley Wylie
- 15. Plants in the literatures of Australia John Charles Ryan
- 16. Plants in the literatures of Southern Africa Dan Wylie
- 17. Lotus: an un-still life in the literatures of China Xiaofei Tian
- 18. Plants in the literatures of India Sourit Bhattacharya
- 19. Tree-rings of Middle Eastern poetry Efe Khayyat.
