Radical Botany excavates a tradition in which plants are participants in the effort to imagine new worlds and to envision new futures. In this context, modernity is defined by the idea of all life as vegetal. We argue that the recognition of plants' liveliness and animation, in conversation with scientific discoveries about plants from the seventeenth century to today, has mobilized speculative creation in fiction, cinema, and art. Radical Botany reveals the centuries-long history behind the contemporary field of critical plant studies and suggests connections linking early modern materialisms, including erudite libertinism and Epicureanism, to modern materialist philosophy, art, and literature. Plants, animated within radical botanical thought, come alive to complement and challenge notions of human life. Our book traces the implications of this speculative mobilization of plants for feminism, queer studies, and posthumanist thought. If, as Michael Foucault has argued, the notion of the human was born at a particular historical moment and is now nearing its end, Radical Botany reveals that this origin and endpoint are deeply informed by vegetality as a form of pre- and posthuman subjectivity. The trajectory of speculative fiction which this book traces offers insights into the human relationship to animate matter and the technological mediations through which we enter into contact with the material world.

Plants profoundly shape human experience in contexts ranging from early modern absolutist societies to our own late capitalism when life is manipulated on the molecular level and in its everyday rhythms, and when climate change has brought about the onset of the Sixth Mass Extinction.