Insects have always been a visible presence in human life. We see them clearly as they buzz around our faces, as they nibble on our houseplants, as they invade our kitchens. We are most likely to consider them a nuisance to be avoided, if not eradicated altogether. The lessons of Silent Spring notwithstanding, we screen and we spray. We zap and we exterminate. We slather on DEET, or perhaps we reach for organic solutions, simply to keep them out of our orbit. And why shouldn’t we, when their stings and their bites are so irritating? Insects visibly intrude on the human body, oftentimes in unpleasant and now – with the rise of West Nile, Lyme disease, and so on – dangerous ways. In addition, they penetrate human spaces. They can make human domesticity much less hospitable (bedbugs!), and they can challenge the idea that we are sovereign over our own bodies, not to mention our dwelling spaces.

Yet paradoxically, insects have also been relatively invisible to humans. That is, while we recognize the negative ways in which they impact our life, we have been slower to perceive the innumerable and indiscernible ways in which they aid human purpose. Only very recently have we started to acknowledge that insects are our allies just as often as our enemies. In the face of what has been dubbed “Insect Armageddon,” new attention is being paid to the barely noticeable yet essential function of “bugs.” (More on that nomenclature later.) Recent notice paid to the vanishing monarch butterfly has sounded the clarion call. Imagine the world that follows in the disappearance of this stunning and necessary creature! The recent decimation of the bee population has similarly received much urgent press.

But we are also seeing important new scholarship presenting less obviously aesthetic – and much more repugnant – insects. To take just a small sample, books like The Secret Life of Flies by Erica McAllister, Extraordinary Insects by Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson, or Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology by Lisa Margonelli instill an appreciation for the extraordinary capacity of unlikeable insects to do terrestrial labor – whether it be aiding decomposition or modeling eusociality.¹ On the more academic side, Jussi Parikka, among others, has sought to explore insects as alien intelligence. His work draws on last-century scientists like Karl von Frisch and William Morton Wheeler.² In a similar vein, a collection like Insect Poetics, edited by Eric Brown, demonstrates just how important the natural history of insects is to human intellect and civilization.³ For writers and scholars like these, insects are not only visible, they are vitally important for a fuller understanding of both natural and cultural processes.

We might say, generally speaking, that if most humans have long preferred to remove themselves from the bother of insect life, that attitude has now begun to change. We are slowly coming to understand that as a species we are deeply intertwined with insects. We depend upon them in both visible and invisible ways. And, while we begin to recognize our debt to them, we also begin to intuit what we don’t yet fully comprehend – namely, their extraordinary impact on the planet. Grounded in modern entomology, recent books about insects, especially when written for a broad, popular audience, provide a tremendous service: they widen our knowledge of insects and they make our debt to them clear. But they cannot tell us the story of how we arrived at the place where insects can be both visible in everyday life and invisible to terrestrial survival. The purpose of such books is not to explore how amateur eyes came to undervalue the vital and often unperceived contributions of insects. How is it that only now, when insects threaten to disappear altogether, that so many of us finally want to see them in all their dimensions so clearly? How is it that humans have always lived so intertwined with their insect brethren and yet, only now, come to fully appreciate that entanglement?

To answer questions like these we need to turn to history and in particular to the moment when the human-insect relation assumed the form it largely carries today – namely, the eighteenth century. On the one hand, the eighteenth century saw the birth of the modern scientific disciplines, among them multiple natural fields – subjects like geology, ornithology, botany, conchology, and entomology. The natural sciences – and particularly entomology – would soon contribute to the hyper-visibility of insects. Isolated and pinned for close inspection, insects captured and transported from around the globe were soon available for close scrutiny in trays, boxes, and cabinets or illustrated for delectation in beautifully bound, heavy volumes. On the other hand, at the exact same moment, a host of popular eighteenth-century authors – among them Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Jane Austen – were jointly contributing to what has been called the rise of the novel. The story of how modern fiction came to assume its familiar form is well rehearsed by scholars – and certainly contested. Less obvious, perhaps, is the fact that practically none of the canonical authors mentioned here included insects in the human stories they told.

Think about it: though eighteenth-century individuals waged constant battles with insect infestations both large and small, Tom Jones remains immune to their effects. Even a “tumble” in the insect-ridden brush with Molly Seagrim apparently fails to yield a single bite – not to mention a single louse. Though flies were surely a persistent problem in the unscreened world of eighteenth-century London, Clarissa Harlowe never encounters a single specimen. Later, when in Tristram Shandy Sterne’s beloved Uncle Toby releases a solitary fly to his fate, the scene becomes memorable precisely because the event is so extraordinary in the world of the novel. In the meantime, though small lapdogs surely carry their own colonies of minuscule critters, Elizabeth Bennett never got a fleabite. Nor does any Austen character ever encounter the vibrant world of bees, butterflies, or moths. Much later, modernism will change this pattern by allowing insects to reappear in close proximity to recognizably “real” characters, but then insects almost always indicate abjection or the loss of human control, as Kafka’s surreal tale of metamorphosis makes clear.

Of course, this is not to say that insects disappear from other eighteenth-century literary genres. To the contrary, insects will appear elsewhere – in poetry, to be sure – in James Thomson’s serial poem The Seasons, as well as in lyric forms by late-century authors like William Blake and John Clare.⁴ While the former produced his dark and disturbing illustrated lyric “The Ghost of a Flea,” the latter is now admired for his celebratory verses on a myriad of flying things. Insects also figure prominently in the eighteenth-century georgic. Their appearance in James Grainger’s The Sugar Cane, for instance, has received much recent academic attention and discussion.⁵ As discussed in Chapter 2, throughout the eighteenth century, satire continued to afford space to insects, especially in relation to political prose or the grotesquely comic.

Yet with all this said, the complete absence of insects from the realist novel becomes all the more striking. As we will see, the birth of the eighteenth-century realist protagonist was predicated on his isolation from a number of important material processes and from all kinds of material beings. Animals play a part in this story, but unlike animals, insects do not appear at all. In the eighteenth-century British realist novel, the ecosystem of the human will be the world where insects are not. My project investigates insects as “invisible visibles” – that is, as specific kinds of non-human material agents that interacted with human beings during the British eighteenth century. It explores how insects were banished from certain forms of British cultural expression at the same time that they were becoming highly observable in others, such as entomological collection and illustration. Thus, it is the juxtaposition of the invisible and visible that interests me here.

On the one hand, that we bristle at the very thought of Clarissa battling with flies, or an Austen character with a flea bite, suggests how powerfully – and erroneously – we have come to envision our human subjectivity as being at remove from our natural kinship with insects. Our eighteenth-century realist fictions insist that we live at a distance from the world of insects and other tiny creatures. On the other hand, and at the same time that the novel comes into being, early entomological practice surveys a world of living, breathing creatures, but it quickly isolates them for observation as frozen, immobile specimens. In both cases, humans come to think of themselves as self-enclosed and separate from the natural world. In both cases, human exceptionalism pretends that we are neither animals ourselves nor a species living in contiguity with other forms of terrestrial life. Thus, in tracing the story of insect disappearance from one specific site of cultural expression and its subsequent appearance elsewhere, we stand not only to recover a lost history but also, perhaps, to arrive at a different understanding of human-non-human entanglement.

But to begin, what accounts for the initial separation of the literary from the scientific, the disappearance of insects from the page of the novel alongside their simultaneous appearance on the scientist’s table? It has become commonplace to turn to one explanation in particular, Bruno Latour’s influential account in We Have Never Been Modern. Latour coins the word “purification” to describe the attempted separation of nature from culture, as well as the division of human from non-human matters of inquiry. Like many others, he traces this separation in part to Kantian philosophy, but he also gives much weight to the scientific revolution. Following the work of Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin in Leviathan and the Air Pump, Latour traces key differences in the way that scientist Robert Boyle and philosopher Thomas Hobbes approached their respective subjects. Here is his summary:

Though the project of the realist novel is certainly distinct from that of philosophers like Hobbes, nonetheless its work lies on the Hobbesian side of the divide – the side concerned with political expression, representation, the imagination, and the non-empirical to the extent that it too is concerned with the representation of subjects. In the meantime, entomological observation belongs to the other side. There, under new methods for classification and taxonomy, insects become part of what Foucault famously called “the order of things.” In contradistinction to Renaissance practice, a classical episteme involved a paring down of the field of inquiry, so that objects were removed from earlier networks.⁷ Yet Latour rightly insists that the enforced separation of scientific discourse from political/social discourse never really worked: science has never really existed outside social considerations. “Quasi objects” like embryonic stem cells attest to the ongoing enmeshing of the “purely scientific” and the social.

Despite its uneven and incomplete work, the process of purification can be said to have been quite efficacious in one aspect – namely, in its efforts to separate human from non-human, man from animal. This separation has been much noticed – and decried – by a range of scholars attentive to the complicated affiliation of human and animal. John Berger was perhaps among the first to meditate on the consequences of Cartesian philosophy for this particular connection. “In dividing absolutely body from soul,” he writes, Descartes “bequeathed the body to the laws of physics and mechanics, and since animals were soulless, the animal was reduced to the model of a machine.”⁸ Though other factors complicate this alignment of the animal with the machine, Berger’s meditation corresponds to the interdisciplinary field of Animal Studies. Since the end of the last century, this field has offered a consistent methodology, as well as some important organizing questions, for a consideration of the human/non-human relation. With scholars working in the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, Animal Studies explores all aspects of the human-animal connection. Its theorists consider the treatment, representation, and philosophy of animal life from both a historical and contemporary point of view, and they are dedicated to an ethical enhancement of animal life.

Animal Studies often works by querying the human-animal binary, reminding us that humans are in fact a subset of the animal – and not its binary opposite. In this way Animal Studies is indebted to late twentieth-century deconstruction. Though deconstruction is sometimes misunderstood and miscategorized as a nihilistic practice that “tears ideas apart/down,” in fact it works best when it goes beyond the consideration of opposing categories or binaries to interrogate the philosophical assumptions that generated the binaristic logic in the first place.⁹ In the case of Animal Studies, scholars might ask what metaphysical assumptions engendered the notion that the human lives in opposition to the animal. How did the human come to be defined as “not animal”? How did the animal as the binary opposite of the human come to be stripped of what it in fact shares with the human – for example, possible forms of sentience, as well as related forms of self-awareness and self-determination? Animal Studies scholars might also ask how seeing ourselves in such a relation to animals changes our understanding of both ourselves and them. As we will see shortly, Animal Studies also overlaps with biosemiotics, which is defined by its practitioners as “an interdisciplinary research agenda investigating the myriad forms of communication and signification found in and between living systems.”¹⁰ For them, issues of overlap between human and other forms of terrestrial communication become paramount.

Nonetheless, for all its important contributions, Animal Studies has not done a lot to address the human-insect connection – and for good reasons.¹¹ Insects present several significant challenges to any attempt to fully understand what it is to be human, beginning first with the very question of how to define the creature that presents itself in opposition to our human selves. Indeed, while few are likely to misname an “animal,” the term “insect” requires further elucidation.

Technically, insects are a class of the phylum Arthropoda. They have three-part bodies consisting of a head, thorax, and abdomen. They usually have two pairs of wings and three pairs of legs. They also have exoskeletons, or hard outer layers. So mosquitoes, bees, and ants are all insects, but spiders, worms, and lice are not. They belong to different classes of Arthropoda. Traced back to the early seventeenth century, the word “insect” derives from the Latin word “insectum,” indicating a segmented animal, while in turn “insectum” derives from the word “insectare,” or “to cut up.” This derivation leads to a somewhat paradoxical situation in which the singularity of an insect is already a plurality: as beings that are cut into sections, insects are, as Monique Allewaert writes, “more than one even when individual.”¹² In Greek Aristotle called insects “Entoma” because of their segmented anatomy: “I call Entoma which have incisions in their bodies, ventral parts, or in these and also in their dorsal parts.”¹³ And Entoma, of course, provides the root for the modern science of entomology.

In popular parlance, the term “bug” can denote a great many small creatures, and it is easy to see how this term is useful to human purpose. “Bugs” are what bother and annoy. They “bug” us. They very often work contrary to human purpose – they are often what we are trying to get rid of – and their zoological specifications can seem beneath our notice. Yet scientifically speaking, bugs belong to the order Hemiptera. Most have a mouth shaped like a straw called a stylet that they use to suck juices from plants. They also tend to have long, segmented antennae and a specific membranous wing that is thick and colored where it connects to the body, but that becomes thin and transparent toward the end. Thus, all bugs are insects, but not all insects are bugs. And some bugs are not truly bugs – ladybugs, for instance, aren’t bugs, but beetles. Such confusion in terminology speaks to the very fact that, even as we address our insect brethren, we’re not always sure to whom we refer or what exactly constitutes their biology.

Second, while insects in their multiple forms and morphologies resist our attempts to reckon with them as animals, the simple fact of their sheer numbers also makes them a difficult concept to process. By one estimate, there may be over ten quintillion insects on earth at any given time. And they exist everywhere. They have been documented at altitudes from 20 to 15,000 feet, for instance.¹⁴ They also live on every continent, including Antarctica, where their species is represented (at least for the time being, before Antarctica warms up) by one type of midge. Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson tries to give us access to the sheer numbers of insects through this image: if we were to create an “insect of the month” calendar featuring a new species every month, it would take more than 80,000 years to exhaust the possibilities.¹⁵

Yet even after resorting to such imagery, the human imagination soon exhausts itself, and we feel ourselves defeated at the very prospect of having to acknowledge a life form that is beyond human powers of computation. For Hugh Raffles, insect omnipresence in its extraordinary multiplicity reminds us that “every day, above and around us, the collective voyage of billions of beings” is occurring.¹⁶ To reckon with insect numbers and their myriad activities is to be forced to reconsider the size and scope of human life. Precisely because their numbers are unfathomable – unlike, for instance, the number of mammals in the world – insects can threaten “the individualized fantasy of a unique and unitary human being,” writes James Hillman. From a Jungian perspective that might admittedly elicit some skepticism nowadays, he nonetheless aptly hits upon a common human response to insects, especially as they manifest in dreams: “Should the bugs take over, we become mere bits of crawling, leaping, fluttering matter. Their very numbers indicate insignificance and worthlessness as individuals.”¹⁷

Third, while insects challenge us by the sheer fact of their numbers, they also differ from other animals in how they appear to humans, and this too makes their placement within the field of Animal Studies uneasy. As Jamie Lorimer explains it, unlike cuter or cuddlier animals with recognizable appeal (which he calls “non-human charisma”), insects present a form of “feral charisma” that isn’t easy to identify with. Insects do not totally lack that “gift of grace” (in Max Weber’s definition of the term) that allows us to enter into a symmetrical relation with them. But they have very different affordances – or inherent ecological characteristics – from humans, and this makes it hard to see how they live among us. Certainly exceptions occur. For example, asserts Lorimer, we can identify with butterflies because we too orient and differentiate ourselves visually. We might also think of the obvious ways in which bee colonies have seemed to model human sociality. For Lorimer, as for others, Jakob von Uexküll’s stunning account of the life of a tick proves that an ethological perspective foregrounding the important common property of human and insect bodies is possible.¹⁸

Yet such an ability to see into the lives of insects is rare. Most of us are more likely to agree with Hugh Raffles when he writes (evoking Primo Levi), “We simply cannot find ourselves in these creatures. The more we look, the less we know. They are not like us. They do not respond to acts of love or mercy or remorse. It is worse than indifference. It is a deep, dead space without reciprocity, recognition, or even redemption.”¹⁹ As an anthropologist, Raffles has surveyed multiple places where insects intersect with human life, from cricket fighting in China to stag beetle collecting in Japan. For Raffles, insects are the stuff of both our dreams and our nightmares. As he points out, when used in research, insects carry “our dreams of health and longevity,” as the example of the Drosophila (fruit flies) used in DNA experimentation makes clear. In such a case, the flies are so like us “that it seems natural to think of [them] as our biological surrogates.” Yet simultaneously they can be “so entirely unlike us that it seems equally natural to subject [them], with remorse or even concern, to unconstrained destruction,” as when the same fruit flies are destroyed in massive numbers.²⁰ That we routinely seek to decimate entire insect populations demonstrates how expendable we find them. Unlike exotic birds of prey once wantonly destroyed to adorn women’s hats, for instance, insects have not seemed worthy of the conservationists’ efforts until very recently. Even now, we tend to save insects not because of any identification with their suffering or even of their right to existence, but because of something they do for us.

Fourth, lacking those aspects that make other animals approachable, insects act in completely bizarre and incomprehensible ways. They are protean and dynamic. Their movement especially defies human logic. Whether progressing individually or in swarms, they do not observe man-made borders or boundaries, as Raffles points out. In the process they appear to defy human purpose. This is certainly not to say that their movement has not been studied or theorized. For at least one scholar, the apparently irrational – and sometimes insidious – movement of one insect in particular – the tsetse fly – provides the occasion for deeper meditation. Observing its movement across Zimbabwe, where it spread itself by catching a ride under the hood of automobiles, Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga describes the paradoxical situation of an insect creature that is both “an organic vehicle and a passenger, a maker and an outcome of mobilities.”²¹

Yet insects, especially those like tsetse flies, are only doing what humans have already done – namely, invading the space of another. Mavhunga continues:

For Mavhunga, the story of insects in Africa provides the impetus to reconsider the very notion of mobility: what might the astonishing movement of insects teach us about our own postmodern forms of movement and their environmental consequences?

In Mavhunga’s postcolonial take on insects, we come to a fifth possible reason that insects resist being incorporated into the field of Animal Studies: their plasticity. In biology the word simply means the adaptability of an organism to its habitat. But Renisa Mawani discovers tremendous power in the concept as it is developed in the work of philosopher Catherine Malabou. For Malabou, plasticity is a mode of being in itself. Mawani extends Malabou’s definition to argue that insects as “plastic life” have the capacity to change, mutate, and explode otherwise stable forms of being. Though she evinces deep concern about ways in which the US military currently harnesses insect plasticity for its own technologies (for example, in modeling its surveillance drones on insects), in the end she finds much to admire in insect plasticity. For example, she praises the diversity, richness, and multiplicity of the species, as well as insect ability to evolve, transform, and innovate: “It is in their fecundity, ferality, and inscrutability that insects vividly display the plasticity of life.”²³ Like Mavhunga, Mawani respects the way insect mobility escapes modes of human regulation. Insect plasticity animates the life and death of the species. While insect plasticity results in their status as enigmatic objects of study for humans, it is also what allows them to reply to internal and external forces – and possibly to suggest creative forms of resistance.

In sum, clearly human response to insect presence runs the gamut. On the negative side, insects provoke horror and disgust. For many, they are aligned with a state of abjection, a primal and incomprehensible form of materiality that defies logic and befuddles human reason. To many, insects are an inimical life force. Their intrusion into human realms must be carefully managed and resisted. Unlike other animals, they offer no point of identification. Their very presence can precipitate a spiritual or existential crisis. Yet at the same time, on the positive side, insects can elicit joy and a sense of wonder. They can signal alternative modes of being – and possibly even superior modes of being to those who are willing to investigate their life systems and modes of adaptation. If, in a statement that is often traced to Lévi-Strauss, “animals are good to think with,” insects provide an especially brilliant opportunity for human cognition and intellectual process.²⁴

All the more remarkable, then, that the western realist novel that emerges at the beginning of the eighteenth century neither shows an interest in the vital insect category of materiality nor evinces curiosity about what insect life might mean for human subjectivity. This book responds to this disinclination by asking what happens when we consider the various places where insects could have been in the eighteenth-century realist novel. How does the very configuration of a “realist” world look different when the absence of insects is noticed? What are the consequences of a realist novelistic tradition that belies the extraordinary importance of insects to human life? At the same time, how were insects being known, seen, and elsewhere processed? How did emerging entomology, contemporaneous to the rise of the novel, similarly work to shape a sense of the “real,” as well as the “real” human conditions of terrestrial existence?

In order to answer these questions, my method borrows from a number of interdisciplinary practices that I believe are vital to any project that seeks to probe the “human” who lies at the heart of any humanistic study. In the first instance, I am indebted to a growing body of work called material ecocriticism. Material ecocritics root themselves in ecocriticism to the extent that they take up the study of literature and the environment from an interdisciplinary point of view.²⁵ Yet material ecocritics simultaneously invest in new materialist understandings of all materiality as active, self-creative, productive, and unpredictable – as well as “agentic” in its capacity to produce and effect change. The field of material ecocritics is capacious, embracing a number of critical approaches and philosophies. For example, it can be said to include the work of Jane Bennett, whose highly influential book Vibrant Matter identifies a “vibrant materiality” running through both human and non-human entities. She illuminates as well the idea that agency must be located in a range of related forces, some embodied in human and non-human forms, others in more abstract and intangible ways.²⁶ Bennett’s philosophy is indebted in turn to the work of Deleuze and Guattari, for whom a botanical entity – a rhizome, or plant stem – provides a model for thinking about modes of organization.²⁷ At once multiplicitous, heterogeneous, and – most importantly – non-hierarchical, the rhizome has no identifiable beginning or end, but instead models an evolving system in which all points are equally related to and dependent upon each other. In other words, using nature as their inspiration, Deleuze and Guattari lead us to a form of “horizontal thinking” resistant to vertical logic. As I will argue at the end of my book, such ways of thinking about the unfolding of material process, as well as the practice of “horizontal thinking,” can provoke questions about how human existence is figured in the realist novel. Taking up the notion of a planetary “vibrant materiality” means resisting the notion that the human subject is discrete, self-directed, autonomous, and supremely commanding. In other words, considering the human figure against the backdrop of vibrant materiality means opening up a space for insects to reenter the human story.

Material ecocriticism also insists that all nature enunciates. Where Animal Studies encourages us to see human life as animal life, material ecocriticism similarly considers human articulation in relation to terrestrial articulation. Biosemiotics in particular comes into being to explore how human speech can be understood as a highly evolved and specialized subset of the earth’s own capacity to “tell stories.”²⁸ My project takes seriously the idea that the insect world has long been telling a story that we have not yet adequately heard or processed. Indeed, many of us have had neither the willingness nor the ability to do so. For a long time, many of us have too often envisioned ourselves in a binaristic relation to insects (us versus “the bugs”) without acknowledging the extent to which our account is embedded in a larger terrestrial story that includes the story of insects.

Admittedly, there are risks to my way of engaging with literary history: why talk about something that doesn’t appear in a novelistic genre, and besides, what might be the point of discussing what a genre like the realist novel doesn’t do? Doesn’t realism necessarily leave all sorts of things out? However, as I will argue later, there is both a precedent for my questions and very good reasons for asking them. If literary studies are to claim any relevance as a useful public tool in the fight against catastrophic climate change in particular, we must explore new ways of reading – as well as new ways of teaching – the texts that have shaped the humanistic tradition. Far from “cancelling” these texts, we need to foreground them as opportunities for vibrant conversations about how we got to where we are today. Moreover, though we have long assumed that the literary works and historical scientific practices warrant separate treatment, it becomes apparent now that considering both together can help to illuminate how we have come to define ourselves as human.

At the same time that material ecocriticism grounds my project, I situate my work within a subfield that announces itself: Critical Insect Studies. By definition, this field reconsiders the place of the human in the material world by focusing on the insect-human interconnection. Following in the wake of other interdisciplinary fields that currently encourage conversation between humanists and scientists, Critical Insect Studies reexamines the place of insects in human life, but also seeks out places where insect activity has been crucial to human purpose, even when such activity has been invisible or has gone unrecognized. Thus, Critical Insect Studies acknowledges the actual role of insect life in human production, recognizing not only the destructive capacity of insects but also the myriad ways in which insects benefit the human. In short, how have the human and the insect been mutually constituted?²⁹

And so this book returns to the moment when a still familiar form of subjectivity emerges in order to ask about human-insect entanglement. Yet what, precisely, is “entanglement”? As a key concept appearing in a range of materialist practices, the term requires further elucidation, since its origins in multiple disciplines have resulted in slightly different, yet overlapping, meanings. To consider the full weight of the term is necessarily to digress from the topic of insects – though, as we’ll see, not for long.

Those working in material culture or what is sometimes called “materiality studies” often credit archeologist Ian Hodder with giving the term its theoretical weight. Overlapping with political theorist Jane Bennett, Hodder begins with things: “Things exist in a world that is to some degree their own. Things have lives, vibrant lives, and temporalities, and they depend on each other and on humans.”³⁰ For him, the concept of “things” is broad enough to encompass both man-made and natural phenomena: we find “things,” he explains, when out of materiality arise “bundles of presence and duration in the continual flows of matter, energy, and information.”³¹ In Hodder’s sense, then, both humans and insects are “things” – both are “bundles of presence” with durability, though they also have radically different temporalities. Insect lives are, for the most part, quite short – with mayflies lasting for only twenty-four hours. At the same time, fossil evidence suggests that cockroaches have been around for 300 million years – and some, of course, predict that they will outlast us all. Similarly, locusts that ruthlessly devour crops produced carefully, cultivated by humans according to established temporal patterns, appear to operate with the grossest insensitivity to human temporality, with no regard for what is needed this year or the next.

For Hodder entanglement involves the mutual embedding of humans within a world of things and things within the world of humans. He defines entanglement as “a dialectical relationship between [human] dependence [on things], often productive and enabling, and [human] dependency, often constraining and limiting.”³² This definition of entanglement applies especially well to humans and insects: any thorough telluric history would acknowledge how insects have abetted human purpose through processes like decomposition and pollination, yet it would also point out (and perhaps lament) how they have limited human action. Hodder positions entanglement in relation to a series of concepts in different but related disciplines, including Heidegger’s “equipmental totality”; the “chaînes opératoires” of French technological studies; anthropological “enchainment”; and biological mutualism and symbiosis.³³ Yet he claims that an insistence on human dependence makes his idea slightly different from those of the others: “As humans increasingly live in a world they have produced, they have to work harder to reproduce that world on which they depend. This is dependency.”³⁴

Hodder frequently employs the verb “traps” and the noun “entrapment,” as well as related vocabulary, to suggest that entanglement is an unavoidable situation for humans in their evolutionary processes, and in this way he emphasizes darker aspects of entanglement – arguably at the expense of the advantages to be found in an entangled existence. In his analysis, once we come to depend on certain things, those things in turn make demands on us and we must perform the actions necessary to keep them in our lives. For example, as a necessary condition for making bread, “Cereal domestication locks humans into greater labor per unit of land as ground is cleared, prepared, dug over, seeds are planted followed by weeding, protecting from animals, harvesting, threshing, winnowing, roasting, pounding, grinding.”³⁵ Yet tellingly in this example of agricultural production Hodder makes no mention of the insects who must accompany human action at each stage, helpfully and unhelpfully. At least in this instance, human-insect entanglement remains invisible. Nonetheless Hodder’s overall approach is useful for its reminder that humans do not live in isolation – and indeed they cannot exist – except in relation to other forms of materiality. For him, humans are material creatures immersed in a sea of materiality that interacts with other materiality, even while he concedes that a human is a material thing “of a particular kind, one that has developed a very large and complex nervous system, body and mind, thoroughly dependent on other things to exist.”³⁶

In a vein similar to Hodder, social anthropologist Tim Ingold has also emerged as an important thinker on the topic of entanglement. For him, it is “a meshwork of interwoven lines of growth and movement.”³⁷ Or, as he elsewhere elaborates, “It is not, then, that things are entangled in relations; rather everything is itself an entanglement, and is thus linked to other things by way of the flows of materials that make it up. So while the material world might be depicted as it is in the weblog logo, as a network of interconnected objects, the world of materials would be better described as a meshwork of interwoven substances.”³⁸ Thus, for Ingold as for Hodder, entanglement means acknowledging vital interrelationships between and among human and non-human forces. For both thinkers, to consider entanglement is once again to refute the idea of the human as discrete, self-contained, or as otherwise set apart from a world of vibrant materiality. As we will see, once the human is placed in this light, insects gain a new visibility.

While archeologists and anthropologists work to understand how humanness is itself embedded in networks of materiality, for other new materialists the term “entanglement” accrues its meaning from quantum physics – and most often from the work of physicist Karen Barad. For her, the term “entanglement” refers to the state of matter – and in particular to the particles of which matter is composed. Quantum physicists use the word to cover the mysterious and even unfathomable situation where two or more particles are interacting together, yet it is impossible to describe the state of one particle apart from the other(s). The phenomenon occurs even when the particles are separated.³⁹ For Barad, “entanglement” becomes a useful concept for thinking about all forms of material life: how can one know one form of materiality without taking into consideration other forms of materiality that help to define and situate it, even while being constituted itself? The concept of entanglement furnishes as well a mode of thinking that Barad calls a “diffractive methodology,” one designed “[to read] insights through one another, [to build] new insights, and attentively and carefully [to read] for differences that matter in their fine details.”⁴⁰

In Barad’s admittedly dense philosophy, the seeds are planted for a new view of all terrestrial life, including the human. Rather than thinking about biological life in terms of units that will react in proscribed, predictable ways, we are encouraged to recognize human bodies in particular as complicated assemblages. In several ways, biologists have laid the groundwork for such a view. As we will see at the end of this book, scientific analysis has moved from a cellular-based conception of life to the now prevalent understanding of biologically based entities as organisms – as individuals in cooperative and competitive relationships. As Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber point out, the microscope, as well as gene sequencing, has brought about the discovery of microbial worlds and “a world of complex, intermingled relationships – not only among microbes, but also between microscopic and macroscopic life.”⁴¹ This paradigm shift contests a view of individual life and results in a “symbiotic view” – that is, the view that all living organisms necessarily participate in close and long-term biological interactions or relationships. In short, research in numerous medical-biological fields has undermined the concept of the “individual.” In its place, a symbiotic view proposes that humans should be thought of as holobionts – creatures whose anatomical, physiological, immunological, and developmental functions evolved in shared relationships of different species. I contend that the concept of the “holobiont” opens the door to an examination of how human life has vitally evolved and developed in relation to our insect kin – as we will see in Chapter 7. Indeed, with the word “holobiont,” we soon arrive at an idea articulated by science writer Ed Yong, namely, that “our [human] lives are influenced by external forces that are actually inside us, by trillions of things that are separate from us and yet very much a part of us.”⁴² Though Yong’s focus is the human-microbe relation, I would like to borrow his words to describe human-insect entanglement: “I now see how the lives of … all creatures depend upon unseen organisms that they live with but are unaware of, that contribute to and sometimes entirely account for their abilities, and that have existed on the planet for longer than they have. It is a dizzying change in perspective, but a glorious one.”⁴³

Thus, from Yong we gain an understanding of our place within terrestrial evolution, but also a diminution of the notion of the human individual as an agent capable of initiating meaningful change on its own. As the COVID-19 crisis of 2020 made abundantly clear, the human body is first and foremost porous – open, accessible, and permeable to non-human forces – like viruses – from the outside. Much like insects, these non-human outside forces observe neither national borders nor boundaries. They move at will and on their own timeline. The fact of this human porosity belies the myth of human self-determination and instills a necessary humility in the face of larger terrestrial energies. At the same time, while one definition of the human loses some of its superpower, another replaces it, this one offering a more realistic sense of human debt to both visible and invisible non-human forces – like insects – that operate inside and outside the boundaries of a single human body. As we come to recognize that symbiosis is the nature of the game, we learn that surely our future lies in acknowledging the vital working of the natural networks in which we find ourselves. It lies as well in working with those networks to ensure mutual survival.

Chapter 1 “Living with Insects in the Eighteenth Century: Henry Fielding and the Ants” opens with a quick survey of real-life insect presence in eighteenth-century Britain, with a special focus on ectoparasites. Insects like fleas and lice not only commonly troubled corporeal existence but also received notice in poetry and prose. In contrast, Fielding’s Tom Jones avoids any mention of insects at all. Why? Here we see how a neoclassical aesthetic explains Fielding’s omission of those aspects of terrestrial life thought to be unworthy of representation. Grounded in the Great Chain of Being, the novel expresses an androcentric view also observed in poets like Alexander Pope. Fielding’s theological and aesthetic commitments also explain the existence of his little-known satire attacking a significant myrmecological work by his cousin Arthur Gould: according to Fielding’s scathing response, humans alone – not insects like ants – deserve the spotlight. As expressed in his satire and elsewhere, Fielding’s agenda belongs to what biosemiotician Wendy Wheeler has called the “semiotic disenchantment” of the world. It also helps to explain why insects go missing.

Chapter 2 “‘The True State of Our Condition,’ or, Where Are Robinson Crusoe’s Insect Companions?” continues with a focus on “absent insects,” this time by asking why Robinson Crusoe’s island is insect-free. From Defoe’s journals we know that Defoe (like others of his time) was aware of their importance to thriving ecosystems. Following Amitav Ghosh’s arguments in The Great Derangement concerning what it means for a realist canon to privilege some things at the expense of others, the chapter explores how human-insect entanglement would have impacted a character like Crusoe. On the one hand, a variety of insects would have proved debilitating as they invaded his body and his dwelling space. Crusoe’s sense of sovereignty would have been sorely compromised by a number of pernicious creatures. On the other hand, insects would have also made his island livable. Insects not only pollinate and make human agriculture possible, but they also remove the rotting flesh and other decaying matter resulting from Crusoe’s presence. However, including insects in the representation would mitigate any novelistic purpose committed to the construction of a mythic, self-determining, self-enclosed, and autonomous hero like Crusoe. Thus, at the dawn of the western realist tradition, the world of the human becomes the place where the insect is not. The omission of insect activity becomes a willful forgetting of the entanglement allowing for planetary existence.

Chapter 3 “Thinking with Insects in Swift and Sterne” takes up two eighteenth-century authors who engage with insects in their satire. Crucial to this chapter is the idea that satire treats the human-non-human binary differently. Even then, this difference only highlights the persistence of what Giorgio Agamben calls the constitutive “operation” of ontology: the placing of a “caesura” that marks the separation of human from animal. The chapter opens with scenes from Gulliver’s Travels in which Gulliver battles with flies and wasps. A brief detour into Swift’s poetry suggests his awareness of their status as pests, yet in his satire insects become something more: they become an existential threat as they figure terrestrial life in its most antagonistic form. The second part of the chapter takes up the appearance of a single fly in Tristram Shandy to ask how this brief scene both does and does not figure entanglement. When read against other scenes of human-animal encounters in Sterne, it suggests a possible entry into an enhanced form of human sympathy that pushes back against Cartesian dualism. However, even then, the fly seems utterly unlike us: its umwelt remains unknown and unknowable. Yet this may be to Sterne’s credit, as work by recent environmental writers like James Bridle suggests: in refraining from making the fly into a knowable creature, Sterne’s representation evokes a radical otherness.

Chapter 4 “Seeing Insects: The Specimen” explores how nascent eighteenth-century entomological practices rendered insects visible as objects of scientific study. After an introduction to the concept of the “Dead Zoo” (or the Natural History Museum), the chapter queries the idea of visibility in science. It begins by surveying methods for the collection, preservation, and display of insects. As the letters of collector Dru Drury illuminate, during the second half of the eighteenth century insects taken from across the globe begin to accrue even more visibility as valuable commodities. The correspondence of Henry Smeathman, the “fly catcher,” and Dru Drury further suggests how insects, transported as cargo on slave ships, became the freighted signifiers of colonial conquest and dispossession: in Arjun Appadurai’s phrase, insects came to represent “the still life of Empire.” The chapter closes with a meditation on what it means to have taken insects out of space and time without heeding the ecosystems in which they thrive. With recourse to David Abram’s philosophic thoughts on the fact of shared respiration among all living things, we can begin to see what possibilities of sensual engagement with the natural world are foreclosed in the Dead Zoo.

Chapter 5 “Seeing Insects: The Artists” continues the focus on “visible” insects, this time by looking at the rise of entomological illustration during the eighteenth century. Although she lived outside the parameters of that time frame, Maria Sibylla Merian inaugurates the genre of modern entomological illustration, grounding it in the Dutch still-life tradition. An essay on aesthetics by phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty allows for reflection on Merian’s status as a visible and mobile “body among things,” a corporeal existence caught up in the “fabric” of the world. As Merian’s biography makes clear, she lived with her caterpillars and thereby arrested an “inner animation” belonging to them. Her illustrations capture not the human subject herself, but an ineffable effect – the imprint of her non-human insect kin upon her embodied subjectivity. The second part of the chapter then turns to Merian’s legacy and her impact on the British illustrators who follow her: Eleazar Albin, Moses Harris, and Edward Donovan. Donovan’s occlusion of parasitic behavior in one especially aesthetically pleasing insect, the Chrysis ignita, leads to a concluding meditation in which I argue for the necessity of accepting a wider planetary rationale, even when it opposes human assumption.

Chapter 6 “Seeing Insects: The Poets” opens with a Romantic lyric by William Wordsworth, “To a Butterfly.” It notes the problematic framing of the poem in which the poet does not seem to exist in the same space as the insect. What if, instead of asking an insect like the butterfly to carry memory and meaning for us, we begin to ask how the natural world looks back at the human? How do we look to the living planet? The chapter takes up three poets who engage with such questions and who perceive insect life as part of a larger process of material unfolding – James Thomson, Erasmus Darwin, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld. First, an essay by Barbauld’s brother John Aikin announces a turn toward nature and the natural world in poetry. One poem in particular – Barbauld’s “To Mrs. P--, with some Drawings of Birds and Insects” – demonstrates the turn put into practice. A discussion of selections from James Thomson’s The Seasons elucidates the poet’s close proximity to living, breathing insects who prove sentient and purposeful. In Thomson’s hands, personification opposes anthropectomy, or the denial of shared characteristics between human and non-human animals. In seeking similitude between human and non-human insects, Thomson facilitates an ecocritical observation that the human is but one example of a world full of signifying creatures. Then, a reading of insect life in Erasmus Darwin’s Temple of Nature identifies his materialist thinking and his recognition that insects are a crucial part of organic process. In his discussion of parasitism in particular we find a premodern acceptance of the notion of symbiotic life. In contrast, in “The Caterpillar” by Anna Laetitia the parasitic behavior of the European tent caterpillar, or Lackey moth, shows us how human ethics can be stretched to their limit when planetary life is observed “looking back.”

Chapter 7 “Living without Insects in Jane Austen’s Emma: A Horizontal Reading” considers Jane Austen’s Emma in light of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s challenge to imagine an alternative kind of humanistic study, one that overcomes anthropocentrism and looks at the world from non-human points of view. I invoke a practice that I call “reading horizontally,” that is, a reading practice that not only opposes the vertical framing established by Austen (as well as Fielding before her) but that heeds the fact that human beings are holobionts. After a review of traditional humanistic readings of the novel, the chapter explores how the novel omits vital biological processes and agents in favor of a particular form of androcentrism where humans not only reign supreme but are also separated from and impervious to the natural world: this can be seen most immediately in the elision of insect action in the novel. The chapter argues that, especially in the wake of COVID-19, this mythic (if pleasurable) construction of the human warrants reexamination. Thus, the chapter both models an alternative reading of a canonical text and proposes integrating new, biologically informed approaches into the reading and teaching of such texts. In other words, literary study has much to gain from newer biological definitions of what it means to be human.