(Publication abstract)

'Storying Plants in Australian Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Roots and Winged Seeds explores cultural and historical aspects of the representation of plants in Australian children’s and young adult literature, encompassing colonial, postcolonial, and Indigenous perspectives. While plants tend to be backgrounded as of less narrative interest than animals and humans, this book, in conversation with the field of critical plant studies, approaches them as living beings worthy of attention. Australia is home to over 20,000 species of native plants – from pungent Eucalypts to twisting mangroves, from tiny orchids to spiky, silvery spinifex. Indigenous Australians have lived with, relied upon, and cultivated these plants for many thousands of years. When European explorers and colonists first invaded Australia, unfamiliar species of plants captured their imagination. Vulnerable to bushfires, climate change, and introduced species, plants continue to occupy fraught but vital places in Australian ecologies, texts, and cultures. Discussing writers from Ambelin Kwaymullina and Aunty Joy Murphy to May Gibbs and Ethel Turner, and embracing transnational perspectives from Ukraine, Poland, and Aotearoa New Zealand, Storying Plants addresses the stories told about plants but also the stories that plants themselves tell, engaging with the wide-ranging significance of plants in Australian children’s and Young Adult literature.'  (Publication summary)

'From the forests of the tales of the Brothers’ Grimm to Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree, from the flowers of Cicely May Barker’s fairies to the treehouse in Andy Griffith and Terry Denton’s popular 13 Story Treehouse series, trees and other plants have been enduring features of stories for children and young adults. Plants act as gateways to other worlds, as liminal spaces, as markers of permanence and change, and as metonyms of childhood and adolescence. This anthology is the first compilation devoted entirely to analysis of the representation of plants in children’s and young adult literatures, reflecting the recent surge of interest in cultural plant studies within the Environmental Humanities.

'Mapping out and presenting an internationally inclusive　view of plant representation　in texts for children and young adults, the volume includes contributions examining European, American, Australian and Asian literatures　and contributes to the research fields of ecocriticism, critical plant studies and　the study of　children’s and young adult literatures.' (Publication summary)

'Agency and identity are developed in young people through many means, including literacy events. The Our Australian Girl series introduces the reader to significant aspects of Australian history and cultural multiplicity while having the potential of nurturing agency development. This article explores the representations of reading and writing that run like a thread throughout the series alongside comparable acts of creation like storytelling, dancing, and drawing. Reading offers the characters of these novels a chance to understand and question their worlds, and writing offers them a chance to remake them.' (Introduction)