ABSTRACT
The overarching concept of the botanical imagination respectfully invokes, builds on, and expands the imagination in some of the earliest and most formative scholarship in ecocriticism. Like ecocriticism more broadly, phytocriticism energizes the process of reformulating human assumptions about "the nature of representation, reference, metaphor, characterization, personae, and canonicity". The foregoing discussion circumscribed botanical criticism as a plant-based form of criticism attentive to the representation of vegetal life—forests, trees, bushes, flowers, herbs, orchids, wildflowers, garden plants—in cultural artifacts, including, but not limited to, literary works. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book argues the prevailing tendency within ecocritical scholarship to examine animal, rather than plant, subjectivities and life-worlds. The sensuous return to vegetal being is actualized here through a focus on contemporary Anglophone poetry written since the end of the Second World War.
