Description:
Focusing on the writing of Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, H.D. and Samuel Beckett, this book uncovers a shared fascination with the aesthetic possibilities of the insect body - its adaptive powers, distinct stages of growth and swarming formations.
Brief description: Rachel Murray is lecturer in English at Loughborough University. She is the author of several book chapters and articles in refereed journals including 'Insects in Language and Literature', A Cultural History of Insects, eds. Gene Kritsky, Vazrick Nasari (Bloomsbury, 2019); 'Beelines: Joyce's Apian Aesthetics', Humanities Special Issue: James Joyce, Animals, and the Non Human, Vol. 6, No. 2 (June 2017), pp. 1-14 and 'Vermicular Origins: The Creative Evolution of Samuel Beckett's Worm' [Winner of the 2016 BSLS/JLS Early Career Essay Prize], Journal of Literature and Science, Vol. 9, No. 2 (2016), pp. 19-35.
Review Quotes: For Murray, we must grapple with the ways in which modernist insects inscribe "a new kind of human existence" and a vision of the "self" that is "more aware of its surroundings, more receptive to other ways of being, more conscious of its frailty," while testing this against later writing that offers a more sustained dismantling of the carapace of individual identity (174).--Derek Ryan "Modernism/modernity, Volume 29, Number 2, April 2022, pp. 431-436"