Poetics of the Hive: The Insect Metaphor in Literature - Hardcover

Hollingsworth, Cristopher

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0877457867 ISBN 13: 9780877457862

Verlag: University of Iowa Press, 2001

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Reseña del editor:

Cris Hollingsworth's waggle dance after scouting the rangiest field of literature--Virgil and Homer down to Milton and Swift, on to Plath and Byatt151;leads you to where the nectar hides. . . . He wisely roams, extracting an anthology of poetry, prose, psychology, history most of all, perception--that tops the bee's knees. --Paul West, author of The Secret Life of WordsHollingsworth'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 ArtCris 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 evolutionary biology 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.

Reseña del editor:

A 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 "evolutionary biology" 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, Hollingsworth reveals the structure behind his metaphor, redefining it as an aesthetically and philosophically potent tableau that he calls the Hive. After establishing the Hive's evolution at the hands of epic poets, Hollingsworth uses the struggle between Swift and Keats over the implications of the insect metaphor to prepare the ground for the Hive's later use as a vehicle for the existentialist condition and subject. Using versions of the Hive taken from Conrad, Wells, and others, Hollingsworth then gauges the impact of colonialism on Europe's imagination of the Other. He then turns to the existential self and examines how Kafka and Sartre each use the Hive to articulate a theory of consciousness and society -- a debate that influences the development of a modern, nonwestern literature. The concluding chapter, an exciting foundation for further cross-cultural work, examines Kobo Abe's Woman in the Dunes and A. S. Byatt's Morpho Eugenia.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: University of Iowa Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0877457867
• ISBN 13: 9780877457862
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 334