Botanical Imagination : Rethinking Plants in Modern Japan

Jon L. Pitt

ISBN 10: 1501780956 / ISBN 13: 9781501780950

Published by Cornell University Press Apr 2025, 2025

About this Item

Neuware - 'This book examines Japanese writers and filmmakers who have responded to moments of crisis in Japan's modern period by imagining what it would mean for humans to be more like plants.'--.

Seller Inventory # 9781501780950

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Botanical Imagination : Rethinking Plants in Modern Japan
• Publisher: Cornell University Press Apr 2025
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1501780956
• ISBN 13: 9781501780950
• Binding: Taschenbuch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 229W x 152H x 18D millimeters 229 millimeters width by 152 millimeters height by 18 millimeters depth
• Weight: 362 grams

About this title

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.

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.