Images of the plant humanities : theory, art and the botanic gaze / Danielle Sands, Daniel Whistler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sands, Danielle, author.

Whistler, Daniel, 1982- author.

Series:

Environmental cultures series.

Environmental cultures series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Human-plant relationships.

Plants (Philosophy).

Plants in art.

Plants in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (334 pages) : illustrations (chiefly color).

Edition:

First edition.

Other Title:

Theory, art and the botanic gaze

Place of Publication:

London : Bloomsbury Publishing, 2026.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Introduction. Thinking plants in pictures and words / Danielle Sands and Daniel Whistler

"What a strange prodigy" : the Welwitschia mirabilis / Katherine Arnold

No monsters here : vegetable teratology and plant horror / Stella Sandford

Abnormal plants and anomalous arts : troubling the non/human norm / Aliya Say

The "plant horror" of Turpin's Urpflanze and Hooker's Welwitschia : narratives of monstrous proliferation and grotesque hybridity / Caroline Harris

Thinking sex with plants : the speculative sexualities of enlightenment botany / Natania Meeker

Fern tongues : a pteridomaniac's imagination of vegetal time and desire / Solvejg Nitzke

Dragon arum : a phytopoetic gaze on vegetal violence and eroticism / Joela Jacobs

The quest for the blue flower : the legacy of German romanticism in three contemporary novels / Isabel Kranz

The temporality of titan arum / John C. Ryan

Prickly-pairs : on humans, plants, and technicity / Ed Thornton

Extending the botanical : agency, abstraction and contemporary plant drawing / Danielle Sands

Undoing the hollow space of representation : Margaret Mee's plant portraits in the Kew collection / Yota Batsaki

Papa and Kuka : a biocultural exploration of two Andean crops / Nataly Allasi Canales and Kim Walker

Lacebark and the interior décor of the Jamaican slave cottage / Steeve Buckridge

Humboldt and Bonpland's essay on the geography of plants : the other side of the physical tableau of the Andes / Quentin Hiernaux

"Where nature stopped half-way" : waterlilies and the foliar theory of the flower / Ulrich Stegmann

The place of algae in experimental natural histories / Joan Steigerwald

A "funeral oration" for lichenology? / Lydia Azadpour

This is not a Brugmansia / Giovanni Aloi

Ginkgo and dark botany / Prudence Gibson and Maya Martin-Westheimer

Anna Atkins' cyanotypes : gestures for hands driven by sunlight / Redell Olsen

The ecology of plant iconography / Laurence Hill

Blue so deep / Ben Woodard

Containing nature in the leaves of a book : botany, bibliography, and the embodiment of thought / Thomas Moynihan

Drawing the Urpflanze : Goethe, Arber, Grothendieck / Sophie Gerber

Afterword. The library and archives at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew / Julia Buckley

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on online resource; title from title details screen (Bloomsbury, viewed August 7, 2026).

Other Format:

Print version: Sands, Danielle Images of the Plant Humanities

ISBN:

9781350502628

9781350502642