What was the role of insects in defining the human during the British eighteenth century? If humans have always been both helpfully and antagonistically entangled with insects, why were insects absent from the stories told in the eighteenth-century realist novel? Through close ecocritical readings of classic eighteenth-century works including Robinson Crusoe and Emma, Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace reconsiders the history of entomology as science and art and places anthropomorphism in its historical context. She examines how insects were collected, classified, transported, and illustrated, touching on places and phenomena such as the Dead Zoo, and shows how they helped establish a particular way of thinking about the place of the human in the natural world. Encouraging us to rethink the traditional humanistic paradigms issuing from the Enlightenment, Wallace demonstrates that, in light of newer biological perspectives like symbiosis, a renewed concept of the human is imperative.

‘Who reads Robinson Crusoe and wonders about sandflies, midges, and ticks? Who would ever have connected Austen's Emma and lice? Insects and the Enlightenment brings posthuman, biosemiotic, animal studies, and new materialist theory to bear on eighteenth-century literature, science, and culture in innovative and important ways.'

Scott Hess - Professor of English and Environmental Sustainability, Earlham College

‘Insects and the Enlightenment offers a captivating account of the swarms of creatures silenced, overlooked, or banished from the fictive worlds of eighteenth-century British literature. This pioneering work of scholarship compellingly argues for a new approach to realism, one capable of registering humanity's entanglement with- and dependence upon- forms of insect life strikingly alien to our own.'

Lynn Festa - Distinguished Professor of English, Rutgers University