Dickinson and the Politics of Plant Sensibility
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8096422 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Mary Kuhn (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 85 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 141-170 |
| Publication date | 2018-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | ELH (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-8304 • E-ISSN: 1080-6547 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/elh.2018.0005 |
| OpenAlex | W2790989924 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 5 |
This essay shows how Emily Dickinson relocates historical agency by attending to the materiality of plant life. An avid gardener, Dickinson was alert to both imperial bioprospecting and plants' own strategies of propagation, and used these human and non-human networks of plant circulation to challenge concepts of nationalism and regionalism that were based in biotic distinctiveness. Moreover, drawing on nineteenth-century scientific discourses about plant sentience, her poems explore the possibility of an active and feeling natural world independent of human hierarchies. Ultimately, Dickinson pushes us beyond the categorical environment towards specific encounters between humans and other forms of life
Aesthetics · Art · Biology · Bioprospecting · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Feeling · Literature · Materiality (auditing · Non-human · Optimal distinctiveness theory · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Regionalism (politics · Sensibility · Sentience · American Environmental and Regional History · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Psychology · Ecology · History · Law · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |