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.

Part I Human-Tree Kinship

Chapter 1: On Becoming-Tree. An Alter-native, Arbo-real Line of Flight in World Literatures in English

Chapter 2: Pacific Perspectives of the Anthropocene: Trees and Human Relationships

Chapter 3: Becoming-botanic: Vegetal Forms of Mourning in Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian

Chapter 4: Russian Bodies, Russian Trees: Examples of Interconnections between the Tree of the Motherland and the Soviet People



Part II Spiritual Trees

Chapter 5: Trees as the Masters of Monks. Some Observations on the Role of Trees in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers

Chapter 6: The Ash-Tree as ‘Unwobbling Pivot’ in Pound’s Early and Late Poetry

Chapter 7: Seamus Heaney’s Arboreal Poetry

Chapter 8: Between Ecology and Ritual. Images of New Zealand Trees in Grace, Finlayson, Hilliard and Sargeson

Chapter 9: The Tree that Therefore I Am. Humans, Trees and Gods in Cosimo Terlizzi’s Cinema



Part III Trees in/and Literatures

Chapter 10: Flora J. Cooke’s Tree Stories: Progressive Education and Nature in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century United States

Chapter 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 Bacovia

Chapter 13: The Poetization of the Exotic in Early 20th Century Russian Literature: Nikolaj Gumilëv’s Palm Tree

Part IV Trees in the Arts

Chapter 14: Mother Sequoia. Awaiting an Imperceptible Enlightenment Among Millennial Trees Chapter 15: Performing with Spruce Stumps and Old Tjikko. On the Individuality of Trees

Chapter 16: Tuning and Being Tuned by a Patch of Boreal Forest: Works from the Boreal Poetry Garden, Newfoundland, Canada

Part V Trees and Time

Chapter 17: Tree Photography, Arboreal Timescapes and the Archive in Richard Powers’s The Overstory

Chapter 18: Family Trees: Mnemonics, Genealogy, Identity and Cultural Memory