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

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.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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.

Über den Autor / die Autorin

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.

Produktdetails

• Autoren: Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace
• Verlag: Cambridge Academic
• Sprache: Englisch
• Produktform: Fester Einband
• Erscheint: 28.02.2026
• EAN: 9781009692670
• ISBN: 978-1-009-69267-0
• Gewicht: 500 g
• Illustration: Worked examples or Exercises
• Themen: Belletristik > Erzählende Literatur > Hauptwerk vor 1945; Geisteswissenschaften, Kunst, Musik > Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft > Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft; Fiction: special features, Classic fiction (pre c 1945), 18th century, c 1700 to c 1799, Insects (entomology), United Kingdom, Great Britain, Realism, Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800, Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800, Western philosophy: Enlightenment, Classic fiction: literary and general, Narrative theme: animals