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Lesley Wylie, The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature. Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020. xvi + 279 pp. (Cloth US$45.00)
The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature is an important contribution to Ecocriticism, a burgeoning field in current literary and cultural criticism. Its general aim is to challenge Enlightenment's separation between nature and culture by seeing the ways in which human-plant contact is staged through literature and visual culture. Or to put it in Lesley Wylie's clearer and more poetic words: to show "the slippery morphology between things-between plant and animate and inanimate objects" (p. 94) dominating art in Latin America.
Encompassing diverse media, from poems and novels to documentary and installation art, Wylie operates as a literary gardener, exhibiting a constant and impressive attention to the botanical diversity inhabiting canonical and noncanonical texts, from late colonial poems such as Landívar's Rusticatio Mexicana (1782) to Samantha Schweblin's ecogothic novel Distancia de rescate ["Fever Dream"] (2014) passing through Romantic novels such as Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda's Sab (1841) and Cold War epics such as Pablo Neruda's Canto General (1950). As a garden itself, this beautiful edition pays attention to the...