Critical Plant Studies in Taiwan

This book presents a historical overview of vegetal ecocriticism in Taiwan and examines human-plant entanglements on the island.

This timely collection demonstrates the blossoming of critical plant studies in Taiwan, an island of distinctive botanical diversity. Through phytocritical readings of diverse literary and cultural materials, contributors call attention to a range of absorbing topics—from plantation histories and tea poetry to rooftop gardens and millet cultivation—as well as a variety of urban, rural, and wild vegetal agents. Reflecting the multidimensionality of human-flora relations in Taiwan, this landmark publication is the first of its kind to foreground the emergence of the field within a specific cultural context.

How do plants shape Taiwan’s history, culture, and politics? In this groundbreaking critical anthology, Iping Liang and a team of eco-scholars explore the varied interactions and complex relationships between plants, humans, and places in Taiwan. It is a must-read for those who are interested in Taiwan’s Vegetal Humanities scholarship.

Critical Plant Studies in Taiwan, edited by Iping Liang, is a pioneering study about ways in which the vegetal, the botanical, and the human are entangled, and continuously impact on and influence each other. This is a book that offers something for everyone: for the experts and the uninitiated. The essays written by leading scholars in the field of East Asian Critical Plant Studies focus on Taiwan’s varied vegetation.

Iping Liang is Distinguished Professor of English and American studies in the Department of English at National Taiwan Normal University.