Download or read book Plants and Literature written by Randy Laist and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2013-12-05 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. Randy Laist is Associate Professor of English at Goodwin College. He is the author of Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity in Don DeLillo’s Novels and the editor of Looking for Lost: Critical Essays on the Enigmatic Series. He has also published dozens of articles on literature, film, and pedagogy.
Download or read book Plants in Children s and Young Adult Literature written by Melanie Duckworth and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the forests of the tales of the Brothers Grimm to Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree, from the flowers of Cicely May Barker’s fairies to the treehouse in Andy Griffith and Terry Denton’s popular 13-Storey Treehouse series, trees and other plants have been enduring features of stories for children and young adults. Plants act as gateways to other worlds, as liminal spaces, as markers of permanence and change, and as metonyms of childhood and adolescence. This anthology is the first compilation devoted entirely to analysis of the representation of plants in children’s and young adult literatures, reflecting the recent surge of interest in cultural plant studies within the environmental humanities. Mapping out and presenting an internationally inclusive view of plant representation in texts for children and young adults, the volume includes contributions examining European, American, Australian, and Asian literatures and contributes to the research fields of ecocriticism, critical plant studies, and the study of children’s and young adult literatures.
Download or read book The Language of Plants written by Monica Gagliano and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2017-04-25 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eighteenth-century naturalist Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) argued that plants are animate, living beings and attributed them sensation, movement, and a certain degree of mental activity, emphasizing the continuity between humankind and plant existence. Two centuries later, the understanding of plants as active and communicative organisms has reemerged in such diverse fields as plant neurobiology, philosophical posthumanism, and ecocriticism. The Language of Plants brings together groundbreaking essays from across the disciplines to foster a dialogue between the biological sciences and the humanities and to reconsider our relation to the vegetal world in new ethical and political terms. Viewing plants as sophisticated information-processing organisms with complex communication strategies (they can sense and respond to environmental cues and play an active role in their own survival and reproduction through chemical languages) radically transforms our notion of plants as unresponsive beings, ready to be instrumentally appropriated. By providing multifaceted understandings of plants, informed by the latest developments in evolutionary ecology, the philosophy of biology, and ecocritical theory, The Language of Plants promotes the freedom of imagination necessary for a new ecological awareness and more sustainable interactions with diverse life forms. Contributors: Joni Adamson, Arizona State U; Nancy E. Baker, Sarah Lawrence College; Karen L. F. Houle, U of Guelph; Luce Irigaray, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris; Erin James, U of Idaho; Richard Karban, U of California at Davis; André Kessler, Cornell U; Isabel Kranz, U of Vienna; Michael Marder, U of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU); Timothy Morton, Rice U; Christian Nansen, U of California at Davis; Robert A. Raguso, Cornell U; Catriona Sandilands, York U.
Download or read book The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature written by Lesley Wylie and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2020-12-14 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature examines the defining role of plants in cultural expression across Latin America, particularly in literature. From the colonial georgic to Pablo Neruda’s Canto general, Lesley Wylie’s close study of botanical imagery demonstrates the fundamental role of the natural world and the relationship between people and plants in the region. Plants are also central to literary forms originating in the Americas, such as the New World Baroque, described by Alejo Carpentier as “nacido de árboles.” The book establishes how vegetal imaginaries are key to Spanish American attempts to renovate European forms and traditions as well as to the reconfiguration of the relationship between humans and nonhumans. Such a reconfiguration, which persistently draws on indigenous animist ontologies to blur the boundaries between people and plants, anticipates much contemporary ecological thinking about our responsibility towards nonhuman nature and shows how environmental thinking by way of plants has a long history in Latin American literature.
Download or read book Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England written by Leah Knight and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2009 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leah Knight argues that the early modern cultures and cultivation of plants and books depended on each other in historically specific ways. Knight's in-depth readings of sixteenth-century herbals are incorporated in a narrative which establishes the broader context for the interpenetration of plants and writing in the period's cultural practices to illuminate a complex interplay between materials and discourses rarely considered in tandem today.
Download or read book Novel Cultivations written by Elizabeth Hope Chang and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book looks at the transnational circulation of both people and plants as a feature of Victorian speculative fiction"--
Download or read book This Is Your Mind on Plants written by Michael Pollan and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The instant New York Times bestseller | A Washington Post Notable Book | One of NPR's Best Books of the Year “Expert storytelling . . . [Pollan] masterfully elevates a series of big questions about drugs, plants and humans that are likely to leave readers thinking in new ways.” —New York Times Book Review From #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Pollan, a radical challenge to how we think about drugs, and an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants—and the equally powerful taboos. Of all the things humans rely on plants for—sustenance, beauty, medicine, fragrance, flavor, fiber—surely the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness: to stimulate or calm, fiddle with or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. Take coffee and tea: People around the world rely on caffeine to sharpen their minds. But we do not usually think of caffeine as a drug, or our daily use as an addiction, because it is legal and socially acceptable. So, then, what is a “drug”? And why, for example, is making tea from the leaves of a tea plant acceptable, but making tea from a seed head of an opium poppy a federal crime? In This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs—opium, caffeine, and mescaline—and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings? In this unique blend of history, science, and memoir, as well as participatory journalism, Pollan examines and experiences these plants from several very different angles and contexts, and shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively—as a drug, whether licit or illicit. But that is one of the least interesting things you can say about these plants, Pollan shows, for when we take them into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways we can. Based in part on an essay published almost twenty-five years ago, this groundbreaking and singular consideration of psychoactive plants, and our attraction to them through time, holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world.
Download or read book Flora written by Edward Lucie-Smith and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gardens are reflections of paradise, sanctuaries from the daily grind. Every culture reflects the beauty of the garden, and Flora displays wonderful images of flowers and gardens from a wide variety of societies and historical periods. Featuring 300 gorgeous images from Renaissance masters . . . unique prints and watercolors from Japan and China . . . and magnificent works by contemporary artists, Flora takes readers on a wonderful horticultural journey around the globe and through the ages. This lavish world tour is accompanied by prose and poetry which calms the mind and relaxes the body.
Download or read book The Nation of Plants written by Stefano Mancuso and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2023-04-18 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this playful yet informative manifesto, a leading plant neurobiologist presents the eight fundamental pillars on which the life of plants—and by extension, humans—rests. Even if they behave as though they were, humans are not the masters of the Earth, but only one of its most irksome residents. From the moment of their arrival, about three hundred thousand years ago—nothing when compared to the history of life on our planet—humans have succeeded in changing the conditions of the planet so drastically as to make it a dangerous place for their own survival. The causes of this reckless behavior are in part inherent in their predatory nature, but they also depend on our total incomprehension of the rules that govern a community of living beings. We behave like children who wreak havoc, unaware of the significance of the things they are playing with. In The Nation of Plants, the most important, widespread, and powerful nation on Earth finally gets to speak. Like attentive parents, plants, after making it possible for us to live, have come to our aid once again, giving us their rules: the first Universal Declaration of Rights of Living Beings written by the plants. A short charter based on the general principles that regulate the common life of plants, it establishes norms applicable to all living beings. Compared to our constitutions, which place humans at the center of the entire juridical reality, in conformity with an anthropocentricism that reduces to things all that is not human, plants offer us a revolution.
Download or read book Covert Plants written by Prudence Gibson and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2018 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covert Plants contributes to newly emerging discourses on the implications of vegetal life for the arts and culture. This stretches to changes in our perception of 'nature' and to the adapting roles of botany, evolutionary ecology, and environmental aesthetics in the humanities. Its editors and contributors seek various expressions of vegetal life rather than the mere representation of such, and they proceed from the conviction that a rigorous approach to thinking with and through vegetal life must be interdisciplinary. At a time when urgent calls for restorative care and reparative action have been sounded for the environment, this essay volume presents a range of academic and creative perspectives, from evolutionary biology to literary theory, philosophy to poetry, which respond to the perplexing problems and paradoxes of vegetal thinking. Representations of vegetal life often include plant analogies and plant imagery. These representations have at times obscured the diversity of plant behavior and experience. Covert Plants probes the implications of vegetal life for thought and how new plant science is changing our perception of the vegetal - around us and in us. How can we think, speak, and write about plant life without falling into human-nature dyads, or without tumbling into reductive theoretical notions about the always complex relations between cognition and action, identity and value, subject and object? A full view of this shifting perspective requires a 'stereoscopic' lens through which to view plants, but also simultaneously to alter our human-centered viewpoint. Plants are no longer the passive object of contemplation, but are increasingly resembling 'subjects, ' 'stakeholders, ' or 'actors.' As such, the plant now makes unprecedented demands upon the nature of contemplation itself. Moreover, the aesthetic, political, and legal implications of new knowledge regarding plants' ability to communicate, sense, and learn require intensive, cross-disciplinary investigation. By doing this, we can intervene into current attitudes to climate change and sustainability, and hopefully revise, for the better, human philosophies, ethics, and aesthetics that touch upon plant life. TABLE OF CONTENTS// Baylee Brits and Prudence Gibson, "Introduction: Covert Plants" - Prudence Gibson and Michael Marder, "Art Expresses Its Own Appearance: A Conversation with Michael Marder" - Prudence Gibson, "The Colour Green" - Baylee Brits, "Brain Trees: Neuroscientific Metaphor and Botanical Thought" - Dalia Nassar, "Metaphoric Plants: Goethe's Metamorphosis of Plants and the Metaphors of Reason" - Stephen Muecke, "Mixed up with Trees: The Gadgur and the Dreaming" - Monica Gagliano, "Eco-psychology and the Return to the Dream of Nature" - Suzanne Anker, "The Blue Rose" - Susie Pratt, "Trees as Landlords and Other Public Experiments: An Interview with Natalie Jeremijenko" - Tessa Laird, "Spores from Space: Becoming the Alien" - Jennifer Mae Hamilton, "Gardening After the Anthropocene: Creating Different Relations between Humans and Edible Plants in Sydney" - Lucas Ihlein, "Agricultural Inventiveness: Beyond Environmental Management?" - Andrew Belletty, "An Ear to the Ground" - Ben Woodard, "Continuous Green Abstraction: Embodied Knowledge, Intuition, and Metaphor" - Lisa Dowdall, "Figures" - Poems by Luke Fischer, Justin Clemens, Paul Dawson, and Tamryn Bennett.
Download or read book Plants in Science Fiction written by Katherine E. Bishop and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2020-05-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first volume of its kind Plants in Science Fiction shows how considerations of plant-life in SF can transform our understanding of institutions and boundaries, erecting – and dismantling – new visions of utopian and dystopian futures. Its original essays argue that plant-life in SF is transforming our attitudes toward morality, politics, economics, and cultural life.
Download or read book Radical Botany written by Natania Meeker and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2019 Science Fiction & Technoculture Studies Book Prize Radical Botany excavates a tradition in which plants participate in the effort to imagine new worlds and envision new futures. Modernity, the book claims, is defined by the idea of all life as vegetal. Meeker and Szabari argue that the recognition of plants’ liveliness and animation, as a result of scientific discoveries from the seventeenth century to today, has mobilized speculative creation in fiction, cinema, and art. Plants complement and challenge notions of human life. Radical Botany traces the implications of the speculative mobilization of plants for feminism, queer studies, and posthumanist thought. If, as Michael Foucault has argued, the notion of the human was born at a particular historical moment and is now nearing its end, Radical Botany reveals that this origin and endpoint are deeply informed by vegetality as a form of pre- and posthuman subjectivity. The trajectory of speculative fiction which this book traces offers insights into the human relationship to animate matter and the technological mediations through which we enter into contact with the material world. Plants profoundly shape human experience, from early modern absolutist societies to late capitalism’s manipulations of life and the onset of climate change and attendant mass extinction. A major intervention in critical plant studies, Radical Botany reveals the centuries-long history by which science and the arts have combined to posit plants as the model for all animate life and thereby envision a different future for the cosmos.
Download or read book How Plants Get Their Names written by Liberty Hyde Bailey and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 1963-01-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With "knowledge, authority, charm and eloquence," author explains reasons for scientific nomenclature, history of terms, components, other helpful material.
Download or read book Mechanisms of Plant Growth and Improved Productivity Modern Approaches written by Amarjit Basra and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 1994-06-29 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the mechanisms of plant productivity and the factors limiting net photosynthesis, describing techniques to isolate, characterize and manipulate specific plant genes in order to enhance productivity. The uptake of carbon and the practical aspects of plant nutrition are discussed.
Download or read book Sacred Seeds written by Edward McLean Test and published by University of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than five hundred years after the fact, present-day writers still use hyperbolic adjectives to describe the “discovery” of the Americas. Columbus’s crossing of the Atlantic—and the age of exploration that ensued—dramatically and forever changed the early modern world. The societies, economies, cultures, arts, and burgeoning sciences of Europe were quickly transformed by the ongoing encounter with the New World. The meeting of the New and the Old Worlds, however, was more than a meeting of disparate civilizations. It was also a confluence of exciting and often surprising associations that continually created new interfaces between materials and knowledge. The Western and Eastern Hemispheres, brought together by sailing ships for the first time on a large scale, helped create the global landscape we take for granted today. Central to this formative moment in global history were New World plants. The agriculture of indigenous peoples mythically and materially shaped English society and, subsequently, its literature in new and startling ways. Sacred Seeds examines New World plants—tobacco, amaranth, guaiacum, and the prickly pear cactus—and their associated Native myths as they moved across the Atlantic and into English literature. Edward McLean Test reinstates the contributions of indigenous peoples to European society, charting an alternative cultural history that explores the associations and assemblages of transatlantic multiplicity rather than Eurocentric homogeny.
Download or read book Animals Plants and Landscapes written by Hande Gurses and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The landscape of Turkey, with its trees and animals inspires narratives of survival, struggle and escape. Animals, Plants, and Landscapes: An Ecology of Turkish Literature and Film, will be the first major study to offer fresh theoretical insight into this landscape, by offering a collection of analyses of key texts of Turkish literature and cinema. Through discussion of both classical and contemporary works, this volume, paves the way for the formation of a ecocritical canon in Turkish literature and the rise of certain themes that are unique to Turkish experience. Snakes, fishermen and fish who catch men, porcupines contemplating on human agency, dogs exiled on an island and men who put dogs to fights, goat herders and windy steppes of Anatolia are all agents in a territory that constantly shifts. The essays included in this volume demonstrate the ways in which the crystallized relations between human and non-human form, break, and transform.
Download or read book What Plants Need written by Mary Lindeen and published by Norwood House Press. This book was released on 2018-07-02 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Living things, including plants need water, food and food to live and grow. This nonfiction Beginning-to-Read book contains high-frequency words and content vocabulary. Connecting Concepts pages include a word list along with activities to strengthen early science and literacy skills, such as understanding nonfiction text, science in the real world, science and academic language, fluency, and finding further information. Aligns with Next Generation Science Standards for Grades K-3.
