Melanie Duckworth is Associate Professor of English Literature at Østfold University College, Norway, where she teaches British, postcolonial, and children's literature. Her research interests include Australian literature, plant studies, children's literature, and ecocriticism, and she has published on Australian historical children's fiction, Australian literature, ecofeminism, and contemporary poetry.

Lykke Guanio-Uluru is Professor of Literature at Western Norway University and researches literature and ethics, particularly plant studies, ecocriticism, fantasy, and game studies. She is the author of Ethics and Form in Fantasy Literature (2015) and multiple research articles, and co-editor of Ecocritical Perspectives on Children's Texts and Cultures: Nordic Dialogues (2018).

This lively collection, the first of its kind, maps out and analyses the diverse representation of plants in children's and YA literatures internationally, from the perspective of the rapidly expanding field of cultural plant studies.

Preface

Introduction: Plants in Children's and Young Adult Literature

Part I: Botanical Fascinations

Chapter 1 A Relational Poetics of Plant-Human Interactions: Contrasting the Picturebooks of Cicely Mary Barker and Elsa Beskow

Terri Doughty

Chapter 2 Stamens and Pistils in the Same Flower: Queer Posthuman Performativity of Plants in Finnish Fairy Tale "Pessi ja Illusia"

Katri Aholainen

Chapter 3 Aristotle on Plants: Life, Communion, and Wonder

Hallvard J. Fossheim

Part II: Plants in Folklore and Fantasy

Chapter 4 Come into the Garden, Alice: Rude Flowers, Dream-Rushes, Aphasic Woods, and Other Plants in Lewis Carroll's Nonsense Worlds

Francesca Arnavas

Chapter 5 Fern Blossom and Lilibala: Magical Plants in Serbian Children's Fantasy Fiction

Tijana Tropin and Ivana Mijic Nemet

Chapter 6 Vegetal Magic: Agnieszka's Journey to the Understanding of the Vegetal Other in Naomi Novik's Uprooted

Mónika Rusvai

Part III: Arboreal Embraces

Chapter 7 Arboreal and Maternal Desires: Trees and Mothers in recent Australian Middle-Grade Fiction

Melanie Duckworth

Chapter 8 Arboreal Entanglements: Childrenforest and Deforestation in Ecopoetry by Children

Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Charlotte van Bergen

Chapter 9 "I felt like a tree lost in a storm"-The process of Entangled Knowing, Becoming, and Doing in Beatrice Alemagna's Picturebook Un grande giorno di niente (2016)

Nina Goga

Chapter 10 From Chamomiles to Oaks: Agency and Cultivation of Self-Awareness

Andrea Casals Hill and Alida Mayne-Nicholls

Part IV: Plant Agency and Activism

Chapter 11 Vegetal Individuals and Plant Agency in Twenty-First Century Children's Literature

Anja Höing

Chapter 12 Vegetable Violence: The Agency, Personhood, and Rhetorical Role of Vegetables in Andy Griffiths' and Terry Denton's The 52-Storey Treehouse

Lykke Guanio-Uluru

Chapter 13 The Vegetal Modality of Resistance in Children's Books by/for Indigenous Peoples in the Philippines

Jose Monfred C. Sy

Jose Monfred C. Sy