Plants in Children’s and Young Adult Literature

Description

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. Cover Endorsements Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents List of Figures List of Contributors Preface Introduction: Plants in Children’s and Young Adult Literature PART I: Botanical Fascinations 1. A Relational Poetics of Plant–Human Interactions: Contrasting the Picturebooks of Cicely Mary Barker and Elsa Beskow 2. Stamens and Pistils in the Same Flower: Queer Posthuman Performativity of Plants in the Finnish Fairy Tale “Pessi ja Illusia” 3. Aristotle on Plants: Life, Communion, and Wonder PART II: Plants in Folklore and Fantasy 4. Come into the Garden, Alice: Rude Flowers, Dream-Rushes, Aphasic Woods, and Other Plants in Lewis Carroll’s Nonsense Worlds 5. Fern Blossom and Lilibala: Magical Plants in Serbian Children’s Fantasy Fiction 6. Vegetal Magic: Agnieszka’s Journey to the Understanding of the Vegetal Other in Naomi Novik’s Uprooted PART III: Arboreal Embraces 7. Arboreal and Maternal Desires: Trees and Mothers in recent Australian Middle-Grade Fiction 8. Arboreal Entanglements: Childrenforest and Deforestation in Ecopoetry by Children 9. “I felt like a tree lost in a storm”—The Process of Entangled Knowing, Becoming, and Doing in Beatrice Alemagna’s Picturebook Un grande giorno di niente (2016) 10. From Chamomiles to Oaks: Agency and Cultivation of Self- Awareness PART IV: Plant Agency and Activism 11. Vegetal Individuals and Plant Agency in Twenty-First Century Children’s Literature 12. Vegetable Violence: The Agency, Personhood, and Rhetorical Role of Vegetables in Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton’s The 52-Storey Treehouse 13. The Vegetal Modality of Resistance in Children’s Books by/for Indigenous Peoples in the Philippines Index