Radical Botany

Natania Meeker is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Voluptuous Philosophy: Literary Materialism in the French Enlightenment (Fordham, 2006), coauthor (with Antonia Szabari) of Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction (Fordham, 2020), and coeditor of Women Imagine Change: A Global Anthology of Women's Resistance, 600 B.C.E. to the Present (Routledge, 1997). Antonia Szabari is professor of French and comparative literature at the University of Southern California. Her interests include early modern literature and political culture, interspecies ethics, plant ontology, and speculative fiction, both old and new. She is the author of Less Rightly Said: Scandals and Readers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford University Press, 2009) and co-author, with Natania Meeker, of Radical Botany: Plants and Speculaive Fiction (Fordham University Press, 2019), winner of the 2019 Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies book prize.

Preface vii 1. Radical Botany: An Introduction 1 2. Libertine Botany and Vegetal Modernity 28 3. Plant Societies and Enlightened Vegetality 56 4. The Inorganic Plant in the Romantic Garden 86 5. The End of the World by Other Means 114 6. Plant Horror: Love Your Own Pod 144 7. Becoming Plant Nonetheless 171 Acknowledgments 203 Notes 205 Works Cited 253 Index 269

This vibrant and stimulating co-authored volume joins a growing number of investigations into plant life that differ strikingly from past botanical studies.-- "H-Net Reviews" Radical Botany is an extraordinary contribution to the burgeoning fields of plant studies and the nonhuman turn. The book succeeds beautifully in discovering and entwining an entire tradition of speculative botany that will reshape plant studies and posthumanist theory. I have no doubt this text will be eagerly devoured by readers.---Stacy Alaimo, author of Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times Radical Botany, as its name suggests, provides a cutting-edge intervention in the vegetable in literary and cultural studies.-- "ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment" The idea that plants are both utterly familiar and utterly alien is key to Natania Meeker and Antonia Szabari's wonderfully titled Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction... Radical Botany is a kind of secret history of some revolutionary ways in which the speculative imagination has challenged long-held convictions about what plants are and what they are capable of doing.-- "Public Books"