The Cambridge Handbook of Literature and Plants

Author: Bonnie Lander Johnson

Hardcover

Elucidates the long history of plants in literature across global traditions, examining both literary form and cultural context.

This wide-ranging, accessible handbook reveals the vital role plants have played in literature for two thousand years around the world. Its sections cover historical periods of plant literature, specific global regions and diverse literary forms.

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Hardcover

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Summary

Elucidates the long history of plants in literature across global traditions, examining both literary form and cultural context.

Description

The 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.

About the Author

Bonnie Lander Johnson is Fellow and Associate Professor at Downing College, University of Cambridge. Her academic books include Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Blood Matters (2018) and Botanical Culture and Popular Belief in Shakespeare's England (Cambridge University Press, 2024). She also writes fiction and non-fiction about early modernity and our changing relationship to the natural world.