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 multi-cultural 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, nonwester in 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..

Poetics of the Hive: Insect Metaphor in Literature PDF

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