Trees in Literatures and the Arts

Carmen Concilio is associate professor at the University of Turin.Daniela Fargione is assistant professor at the University of Turin.

Comprised of eighteen eloquently written chapters that elucidate the time-honored kinship between human and vegetal life, Trees in Literatures and the Arts is a fascinating book on human-tree coevolutionary relations. The emerging collective argument is that, examined with their symbolic and cultural meanings in literary texts, arts, and cultural narratives, these relations can enhance ecological consciousness and eradicate anthropocentrism in the ‘humanarboreal’ story.

• Part I Human-Tree KinshipChapter 1: On Becoming-Tree. An Alter-native, Arbo-real Line of Flight in World Literatures in EnglishChapter 2: Pacific Perspectives of the Anthropocene: Trees and Human RelationshipsChapter 3: Becoming-botanic: Vegetal Forms of Mourning in Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home and Han Kang’s The VegetarianChapter 4: Russian Bodies, Russian Trees: Examples of Interconnections between the Tree of the Motherland and the Soviet PeoplePart II Spiritual TreesChapter 5:Trees as the Masters of Monks. Some Observations on the Role of Trees in The Sayings of the Desert FathersChapter 6: The Ash-Tree as ‘Unwobbling Pivot’ in Pound’s Early and Late PoetryChapter 7: Seamus Heaney’s Arboreal PoetryChapter 8: Between Ecology and Ritual. Images of New Zealand Trees in Grace, Finlayson, Hilliard and SargesonChapter 9: The Tree that Therefore I Am. Humans, Trees and Gods in Cosimo Terlizzi’s CinemaPart III Trees in/and LiteraturesChapter 10: Flora J. Cooke’s Tree Stories: Progressive Education and Nature in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century United StatesChapter 11: Talking Trees in Amazonian “Novels of the Jungle”Chapter 12: Gardens of Hell, Trees of Death: For a Poetics of Urban Nature in the Lyrics of George BacoviaChapter 13: The Poetization of the Exotic in Early 20th Century Russian Literature: Nikolaj Gumilëv’s Palm TreePart IV Trees in the ArtsChapter 14: Mother Sequoia. Awaiting an Imperceptible Enlightenment Among Millennial Trees Chapter 15: Performing with Spruce Stumps and Old Tjikko. On the Individuality of TreesChapter 16: Tuning and Being Tuned by a Patch of Boreal Forest: Works from the Boreal Poetry Garden, Newfoundland, CanadaPart V Trees and TimeChapter 17: Tree Photography, Arboreal Timescapes and the Archive in Richard Powers’s The OverstoryChapter 18: Family Trees: Mnemonics, Genealogy, Identity and Cultural Memory