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Insect Poetics Eric C. Brown, editor |
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$75.00 Cloth |
From bees to cockroaches, maps out the important role of insects in our imagination. Insects are everywhere. There are millions of species sharing the world with humans and other animals. Though literally woven into the fabric of human affairs, insects are considered alien from the human world. Animal studies and rights have become a fecund field, but for the most part scant attention has been paid to the relationship between insects and humans. Insect Poetics redresses that imbalance by welcoming insects into the world of letters and cultural debate. In Insect Poetics, the first book to comprehensively explore the cultural and textual meanings of bugs, editor Eric Brown argues that insects are humanity’s “other.” In order to be experienced, the insect world must be mediated by art or technology (as in the case of an ant farm or Kafka’s Metamorphoses) while humans observe, detached and fascinated. In eighteen original essays, this book illuminates the ways in which our human intellectual and cultural models have been influenced by the natural history of insects. Through critical readings contributors address such topics as performing insects in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, the cockroach in the contemporary American novel, the butterfly’s “voyage out” in Virginia Woolf, and images of insect eating in literature and popular culture. In surprising ways, contributors tease out the particularities of insects as cultural signifiers and propose ways of thinking about “insectivity,” suggesting fertile cross-pollinations between entomology and the arts, between insects and the humanities. Contributors: May Berenbaum, Yves Cambefort, Marion W. Copeland, Nicky Coutts, Bertrand Gervais, Sarah Gordon, Cristopher Hollingsworth, Heather Johnson, Richard J. Leskosky, Tony McGowan, Erika Mae Olbricht, Marc Olivier, Roy Rosenstein, Rachel Sarsfield, Charlotte Sleigh, Andre Stipanovic. Eric C. Brown is assistant professor of English at the University of Maine at Farmington. He has written previously about insects and eschatology in Edmund Spenser’s Muiopotmos. 464 pages | 27 halftones | 5 7⁄8 x 9 | 2006 TABLE OF CONTENTS Part I. Literary Entomologies 1. On the Lives of Insects in Literature 2. Bees and Ants: Perceptions of Imperialism in Vergil's Aeneid and Georgics 3. Performing Insects in Shakespeare's Coriolanus 4. Imperfect States: Thoreau, Melville, and “Insectivorous Fate” 5. From the Chrysalis to the Display Case: The Butterfly's "Voyage Out" in Virginia Woolf 6. The End of Insect Imagery: From Dostoyevsky to Kobo Abé via Kafka 7. Dangerous Skin: Bees and Female Figuration in Maher and Plath 8. Voices of the Least Loved: The Cockroach in the Contemporary American Novel Part II. Rhetorics and Aesthetics 9. Reading as a Close Encounter of the Third Kind: An Experiment with Gass's "Order of Insects" 10. A Sacred Insect on the Margins: Emblematic Beetles in the Renaissance 11. Made without Hands: The Representation of Labor in Early Modern Silkworm and Beekeeping Manuals 12. Through a Flea-Glass Darkly: Enlightened Entomologists and the Redemption of Aesthetics in Eighteenth-Century France 13. The Force of the Entomological Other: Insects as Instruments of Intolerant Thought and Oppressive Action Part III. Unsettling Insects 14. Inside Out: The Unsettling Nature of Insects 15. Portraits of the Nonhuman: Visualizations of the Malevolent Insect 16. Size Matters: Big Bugs on the Big Screen 17. Entomophagy: Representations of Insect Eating in Literature and Mass Media Publication History |
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$25.00 Paper