Insects and the Enlightenment Human-Arthropod Entanglement in the British Eighteenth Century

About this book

What was the role of insects in defining the human during the British eighteenth century? If humans have always been both helpfully and antagonistically entangled with insects, why were insects absent from the stories told in the eighteenth-century realist novel? Through close ecocritical readings of classic eighteenth-century works, including Robinson Crusoe and Emma, Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace reconsiders the history of entomology as science and art and places anthropomorphism in its historical context. She examines how insects were collected, classified, transported, and illustrated, touching on places and phenomena such as the Dead Zoo, and shows how they helped establish a particular way of thinking about the place of the human in the natural world. Encouraging us to rethink the traditional humanistic paradigms issuing from the Enlightenment, Wallace demonstrates that, in light of newer biological perspectives like symbiosis, a renewed concept of the human is imperative.

Contents

A theoretical introduction: insects as visible invisibles

1. Living with insects in the eighteenth century: Henry Fielding and the ants
2. 'The true state of our condition,' or, where are Robinson Crusoe's insect companions?
3. Thinking with insects in Swift and Sterne
4. Seeing insects: the specimen
5. Seeing insects: the artists
6. Seeing insects: the poets
7. Living without insects in Jane Austen's Emma: a horizontal reading

Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace is Professor Emerita of English at Boston College. Her previous works include Their Fathers' Daughters: Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth (1991); Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business (1997); The British Slave Trade and Public Memory (2006), and multiple essays on topics relating to eighteenth-century literature and culture, from friendly societies to opera.