Chapter 12 - Plants in the French and Francophone Literary Tradition

Summary

This chapter discusses literary representations of plants in the French and francophone tradition, referencing texts and writers from Europe, the Caribbean, North America, Western Africa, the Indian Ocean, and Southeast Asia. Without pretending to offer an impossibly exhaustive history or a complete list of references, this essay considers a diverse set of examples to signal the broad range of these imaginary encounters with the vegetal, as well as shifting (though sometimes overlapping) approaches to botanical knowledge from the Middle Ages to the present. It also examines how and why plants have served as potent allegorical figures, and then focuses on select images of the plants themselves, noting some of their most popular species as well as the ways in which literary authors have tried to understand the otherness of the vegetal.