The Poetics of Plants in Latin American Literature

Overview

Lesley Wylie’s Leverhulme-supported project (2017-19), The Poetics of Plants in Latin American Literature addressed the significance of plants in Spanish American literature, situating itself in the emerging field of Plant Studies, which recognises the importance of plants to culture, including literary culture. Wylie's research focused on how plants have been key to literary identity in the Americas from colonial poetry to the plantation novel, and explored how plants are not only fundamental to the subject-matter and imagery of much Latin American literature, but also key to forms originating in the Americas, such as the New World baroque, described by the twentieth-century Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier as 'nacido de árboles [born from trees]'.

Publications

Wylie's book, The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2020, followed by the edited collection, Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics (Liverpool University Press, 2023). She has contributed chapters on plants to the Blackwell Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture (Blackwell, 2022), Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics (De Gruyter, 2023), and the Cambridge Handbook of Literature and Plants (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

Image credit: Kapok or silk cotton tree (Ceiba pentandra) growing by a village in Surinam. Colored lithograph by P. Lauters, ca. 1839, after P. J. Benoit. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection, London.