Cristopher Hollingsworth • Poetics of the Hive: Insect Metaphor in Literature

University of Iowa Press, 2001. 325 pages. Advance hardcover edition limited to 750 copies, with publisher's card laid in. Bound in red cloth with title stamped in silver  to spine. Speckled endpapers. Hive illustration chapter headings. VG+ Clean, square, and tight. Mild rubbing to edges; negligible bump to top corner. Dust jacket shows subtle edge tanning. Bright pages free of markings.

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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, 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 transformedby Kafka and Sartre into competing symbols of the modern self's existential condition.