Taking a sharp turn away from the aesthetic, Elizabeth Chang explores an extraordinary range of late nineteenth-century genre fiction on the subject of killer plants. Reading these fictional accounts of murderous trees, human-absorbing fungus, and alien weeds alongside scientific and philosophic writing about intentionality in plants, she argues that both types of writing were addressing the same complex issue: the possibility of plant consciousness, and how such a phenomenon could be detected or represented. Her essay demonstrates that when writers of all stripes tried to close the gap between the thinking plant and the human, the attempt gave rise to entirely new ontological categories of consciousness that could only be represented at the limits of narrative form. (From Introduction, page 9)
...MoreBook Lara Pauline Karpenko; Shalyn Rae Claggett (2016) Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age.
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