Trees Keep Time: An Ecocritical Approach to Literary Temporality

Plants have always been powerful symbols of place, rooted as they are in the local soil. Yet in the Chinese lunar calendar, flowers and plants are also core images for defining and representing seasonal aspects of time. Through a conceptualization of qingjing (情境) that relates literary poesis to emotional interaction with the environment, this chapter executes a thematic comparison of arboreal characters in Sinophone fiction, focusing on how trees as keepers of time form an ecocritical approach to the study of literary temporality. Analyses of works works by Alai 阿来, Chu T’ien-hsin 朱天心, and Dung Kai-cheung 董啟章.