1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910975127903321

Autore

Hollingsworth Cristopher <1961->

Titolo

Poetics of the hive : the insect metaphor in literature / / Cristopher Hollingsworth

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Iowa City, : University of Iowa Press, 2001

ISBN

9781587294037

1587294036

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (327 p.)

Disciplina

809/.9336257

Soggetti

Insects in literature

Insects - Symbolic aspects

Bees in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Preface; Acknowledgments; Introduction: The Alphabet of the Bees; 1 From Homer to Virgil: Hiving the Dark Swarm; 2 From Dante to Milton:The Hive Translated, Then Damned; 3 The Hive, the Fable, and the Imagination ofShadow; 4 The Other as Insect; 5 The Self as Insect; 6 Postmodern Versions of the Self as Insect; Notes; Bibliography; Index

Sommario/riassunto

"Cris Hollingsworth's waggle dance after scouting the rangiest field of literature--Virgil and Homer down to Milton and Swift, on to Plath and Byatt&#$151;leads you to where the nectar hides.... He wisely roams, extracting an anthology of poetry, prose, psychology, history&151;most of all, perception--that tops the bee's knees." --Paul West, author of The Secret Life of Words"Hollingsworth's wide-ranging exploration of the image of the hive is impressive. Poetics of the Hive and its panoply of references cannot fail to enrich university classrooms, especially those devoted to both the visual arts and literature." --Dore Ashton, author of A Fable of Modern Art"Cris Hollingsworth's Poetics of the Hive... is complex, even daring in argument; I'm even more impressed by [his] skill at an increasingly rare critical art, the educing of argument from careful, often brilliant analytical reading of literary texts." --Thomas R. Edwards, executive editor of Raritan: A Quarterly ReviewA study to delight the passionate reader, Poetics of the Hive tells the



story of the evolution of the insect metaphor from antiquity to the multicultural present. An experiment in the &147;evolutionary biology&148; of artistic form, Poetics of the Hive freshly examines classic works of literature, offering a view of poetic creation that complicates our ideas of the past and its formative role in modern consciousness and world literature. In the first part of this lyrical synthesis of rhetoric, visual and postmodern theory, and cognitive science, Cristopher Hollingsworth reveals the structure behind his metaphor, redefining it as an aesthetically and philosophically potent tableau that he calls the Hive. He traces the Hive's evolution in epic poetry from Homer to Milton, which establishes antithetical but complementary images of angelic and demonic bees that Swift, Mandeville, and Keats use variously to debate classical versus emerging ideas of the individual's relationship to society. But the Hive becomes fully psychologized, Hollingsworth argues, only when its use by Conrad and Wells to explore Europe's colonial imagination of the Other is transformed by Kafka and Sartre into competing symbols of the modern self's existential condition.Cristopher Hollingsworth is an assistant professor of English at St. John's University, Staten Island.