Images of the Plant Humanities: Theory, Art and the Botanic Gaze

Confronting the relationship between words and images in the representation of plant life in Western modernity, this interdisciplinary book examines the ways in which plants have been theorised both in contemporary plant humanities and modern thinking about plants more generally. Focusing on the various ways that the vegetal has been represented—or hidden—during modernity, it studies how philosophical, scientific and environmental theories, as well as colonial histories, have determined these representations, as well as the ways in which these representations have themselves influenced theory. Situating itself within the plant-humanities, a developing field of research which draws upon the environmental humanities to rectify the traditional neglect of plants as a model for thinking, it examines aesthetic representations of plant life, and philosophical and scientific thinking about the vegetal, so as to challenge traditional assumptions regarding plant intelligence, agency and communication.