Botanical Imagination

Rethinking Plants in Modern Japan

Jon L Pitt author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cornell University Press

Publishing:15th Apr '25

£21.99

This title is due to be published on 15th April, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

This paperback is available in another edition too:

Botanical Imagination cover

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.

ISBN: 9781501780950

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 454g

252 pages