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

Pitt, Jon L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501780956 ISBN 13: 9781501780950

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2025

Synopsis

Botanical Imagination explores the complicated legacy and enduring lure of plant life in modern Japanese literature and media. Through the lens of critical plant studies, Jon L. Pitt examines Japanese writers' and filmmakers' engagement with plants, 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.

About this title

About the Author

Jon L. Pitt is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the translator of Hiromi Ito's Tree Spirits Grass Spirits.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1501780956
• ISBN 13: 9781501780950
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264