Plant Poetics

Literary Forms and Functions of the Vegetal

Joela Jacobs, Isabel Kranz, Solvejg Nitzke (Herausgeber)

Buch | Hardcover

232 Seiten

2025
Brill (Verlag)
978-90-04-72781-6 (ISBN)

Artikel merken

Plant Poetics: Literary Forms and Functions of the Vegetal traces plants across literary texts from ancient epics to modern poetry. Contextualizing current trends in plant studies, this volume shows how vegetal beings shape our literary and cultural expressions.

Plant Poetics explores the forms and functions of the vegetal across a broad body of literature. From Homer to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and from Jamaica Kincaid to Esther Kinsky, the contributions to this volume trace plants in literary works from around the world. Based on nuanced theoretical and historical groundwork, these readings bring together interdisciplinary perspectives on literary and cultural plant studies. The volume shows how vegetal beings have impacted the ways humans think about narrative time, genre, and writing as a literary practice. Plant Poetics illustrates the capacity of plants to make (literary) worlds and shape their forms.

Joela Jacobs is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Arizona and maintains the Literary and Cultural Plant Studies Network. She works in plant and animal studies, environmental humanities, Jewish studies, the history of sexuality and of science. Isabel Kranz is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She is currently completing a monograph about plants as figures of knowledge from 1700 to 2000 and co-editing a handbook on cultural theory and the vegetal. Solvejg Nitzke is Interim Professor for Comparative Literature at Ruhr-University Bochum. Her publications range from catastrophes and climate to village fiction. Her book Making Kin with Trees: A Cultural Poetics of Interspecies Care will appear in 2025.

Figures

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Joela Jacobs, Isabel Kranz, and Solvejg Nitzke

part 1: Vegetal Forms

1 “Imagine a Green Plant Shooting Up from Its Root”: Goethe’s Vegetal Poetics

Michael Bies

2 Towards a Literary Botanical Approach: Katrina Kalda’s The Country of Trees without Shadows

Rachel Bouvet, Stephanie Posthumus, and Noémie Dubé

3 Tree Trunks in Motion: “Cinematic Style” and Plant Poetics in Alfred Döblin’s “Murder of a Buttercup” and Mountains Oceans Giants

Oliver Völker

part 2: Arboreal Poetics

4 The Deep Time of Life: Narrative Speed as Expression of Arboreal Time Scales in Richard Powers’s The Overstory

Eva Axer

5 From Tree Talk to Forest Thinking: Richard Powers’s The Overstory and Annie Proulx’s Barkskins

Susan McHugh

6 Writing Trees and Chasing Spirits: Marion Poschmann’s and Esther Kinsky’s Third Nature Poetics

Helga G. Braunbeck

part 3: Plant Potentials

7 When Plants Attack: Ancient Sallies in the War on Weeds

Rebecca Armstrong

8 The Poetics of Plants: Performing Speech, Performing Self, Performing Green

Andrée-Anne Kekeh-Dika

9 Vegetal Art and Activism in Frans Krajcberg’s Sculptures

Patrícia Vieira

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	04.06.2025
Reihe/Serie	Critical Plant Studies ; 10
Verlagsort	Leiden
Sprache	englisch
Maße	155 x 235 mm
Gewicht	515 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Naturwissenschaften ► Biologie ► Botanik
ISBN-10	90-04-72781-7 / 9004727817
ISBN-13	978-90-04-72781-6 / 9789004727816
Zustand	Neuware