Plants and literature : : essays in critical plant studies / / edited by Randy Laist ; cover illustration by Jim Horwitz.

• TeilnehmendeR: Laist, Randy, 1974-; Horwitz, Jim.
• Place / Publishing House: Amsterdam, Netherlands ;, New York : : Rodopi,, 2013.; ©2013
• Year of Publication: 2013
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Critical Plant Studies 1.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (264 pages).

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.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction / Randy Laist -- The Progress of Vegetation: Subversion and Vegetarianism in Mansfield Park / Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol -- Plants and the Problem of Authority in the Antebellum U.S. South / Lynne Feeley -- 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 / Akemi Yoshida -- This is Your Brain on Wheat: The Psychology of the Speculator in Frank Norris’ The Pit / Graham Culbertson -- Refusing Form: A Reading of Art, Americanism, and Feminism through Plant Imagery in Susan Glaspell’s The Verge / Stacey Artman -- Surviving the City: Resistance and Plant life in Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and Barnes’ Nightwood / Ria Banerjee -- The Smell of Cottonwood Leaves: Plants and Tayo’s Healing in Silko’s Ceremony / Ubaraj Katawal -- The Bible’s Paradise and Oryx and Crake’s Paradice: A Comparison of the Relationships between Humans and Nature / Rhona Trauvitch -- Iconic/Ironic Greenery: The Cultural Cultivation of Plants in Brecht Evens’ The Making Of / Charlotte Pylyser -- A Return to Transcendentalism in the Twentieth Century: Emerging Plant-Sympathy in The Little Shop of Horrors / Stephanie Lim -- Mean Green Machine: How the Ecological Politics of Alan Moore’s Reimagination of Swamp Thing Brought Eco-consciousness to Comics / Hindi Krinsky -- Reproducing Plant Bodies on the Great Plains / Aubrey Streit Krug -- Contributors -- Index.