Overview
- Brings together postcolonial and Indigenous epistemologies
- Includes transnational perspectives
- Contributes to the growing area of plant studies and literature
Part of the book series: Critical Approaches to Children's Literature (CRACL)
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Table of contents (13 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Plant Temporalities, Roots, and Belonging in Picturebooks
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Front Matter
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Gumnuts and Pohutukawa Babies
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Front Matter
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Winged Seeds: Exile, Adventure, and Migration
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Front Matter
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Visioning and Revisioning Plants in Young Adult Literature
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Storying Plants in Australian Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Roots and Winged Seeds explores cultural and historical aspects of the representation of plants in Australian children’s and young adult literature, encompassing colonial, postcolonial, and Indigenous perspectives. While plants tend to be backgrounded as of less narrative interest than animals and humans, this book, in conversation with the field of critical plant studies, approaches them as living beings worthy of attention. Australia is home to over 20,000 species of native plants – from pungent Eucalypts to twisting mangroves, from tiny orchids to spiky, silvery spinifex. Indigenous Australians have lived with, relied upon, and cultivated these plants for many thousands of years. When European explorers and colonists first invaded Australia, unfamiliar species of plants captured their imagination. Vulnerable to bushfires, climate change, and introduced species, plants continue to occupy fraught butvital places in Australian ecologies, texts, and cultures. Discussing writers from Ambelin Kwaymullina and Aunty Joy Murphy to May Gibbs and Ethel Turner, and embracing transnational perspectives from Ukraine, Poland, and Aotearoa New Zealand, Storying Plants addresses the stories told about plants but also the stories that plants themselves tell, engaging with the wide-ranging significance of plants in Australian children’s and Young Adult literature.
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Melanie Duckworth is an associate professor of English literature at Østfold University College, Norway. Her research interests include Australian literature, contemporary poetry, and ecocriticism, and her research is published in journals including Environmental Humanities, International Research in Children’s Literature, Bookbird, and Australian Literary Studies. Melanie is co-editor of Plants in Children’s and Young Adult Literature (Routledge 2022).
Annika Herb is a researcher, writer, and Education Development Lead at the University of Newcastle, Australia, living and working on Awabakal land. Her research interests include children’s and Young Adult literature, gender and sexuality, queer literature, colonial, postcolonial, and Indigenous literature, and she has published research in Westerly, M/C Journal, Girlhood Studies, and Children’s Literature in Education.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Storying Plants in Australian Children’s and Young Adult Literature
Book Subtitle: Roots and Winged Seeds
Editors: Melanie Duckworth, Annika Herb
Series Title: Critical Approaches to Children's Literature
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39888-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-39887-2Published: 05 October 2023
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-39890-2Due: 05 November 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-39888-9Published: 04 October 2023
Series ISSN: 2753-0825
Series E-ISSN: 2753-0833
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIX, 280
Topics: Children's Literature, Literature, general, Literary Theory