Botanical Imagination: Rethinking Plants in Modern Japan (The Environments of East Asia)

By: Jon L. Pitt

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Synopsis: Botanical Imagination explores the complicated legacy and enduring lure of plant life in modern Japanese literature and media. Using critical plant studies, Jon L. Pitt examines an unlikely group of writers and filmmakers in modern Japan, finding in their works a desire to "become botanical" in both content and form. For nearly one hundred years, a botanical imagination grew in response to moments of crisis in Japan's modern history.Pitt shows how artists were inspired to seek out botanical knowledge in order to construct new forms of subjectivity and attempt to resist certain forms of state violence. As he follows plants through the tangled histories of imperialism and state control, Pitt also uncovers the ways plants were used in the same violence that drove artists to turn to the botanical as a model of resistance in the first place. Botanical Imagination calls on us to rethink plants as significant but ambivalent actors and to turn to the botanical realm as a site of potentiality.

Book Quality:: Publisher Quality
Book Size:: 252 Pages
ISBN-13:: 9781501780981
Related ISBNs:: 9781501780967, 9781501780974, 9781501780950
Publisher:: Cornell University Press
Date of Addition:: 04/15/25
Copyrighted By:: Jon L. Pitt
Adult content:: No
Language:: English
Has Image Descriptions:: No
Categories:: History, Entertainment, Nonfiction, Art and Architecture, Literature and Fiction, Outdoors and Nature, Language Arts
Submitted By:: Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:: This is a copyrighted book.
Foreword by:: Ann Sherif