Insect Poetics

2006

Eric C. Brown, editor

From bees to cockroaches, maps out the important role of insects in our imagination

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 and the cockroach in the contemporary American novel, 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.

From cinematic monstrosities to industrious bees, from sacred scarabs to urban cockroaches, the authors present a lively, critically engaged, and sometimes creepy-crawly account of how and why we think about bugs in the ways we do.

Nigel Rothfels, author of Savages and Beasts

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 C. 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.

From cinematic monstrosities to industrious bees, from sacred scarabs to urban cockroaches, the authors present a lively, critically engaged, and sometimes creepy-crawly account of how and why we think about bugs in the ways we do.

Nigel Rothfels, author of Savages and Beasts

Insect Poetics is an eclectic collection of interesting, competent essays, and it has a good chance of bringing the insect more fully into animal studies generally.

Anthrozoös