Insects in Literature and the Arts

Laurence Talairach-Vielmas is Professor of English at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail and associate researcher at the Alexandre Koyré Centre for the History of Science and Technology in Paris.
Marie Bouchet is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail. She is a specialist of Vladimir Nabokov and a founding member of the Société Vladimir Nabokov, France.

This bilingual collection of essays (in English and French) looks at entomology and representations of insects from a scientific, historical, philosophical, literary and artistic viewpoint.
The contributions illustrate the various responses to the insect world that have developed over centuries, concentrating upon the alien qualities of insects - a radical otherness that has provoked admiration and fear, or contributed to the debates over humans' superiority over animals, especially during the evolutionary theory controversy, or in today's ecological debates. Insects not only helped shape new discourses on nature and on the natural world, but their literary and artistic representations also reveal how humans relate to their environment.

This collection of essays looks at entomology and representations of insects from a scientific, historical, philosophical, literary and artistic viewpoint.

Content: Yves Cambefort : Des scarabées et des hommes. Histoire des coléoptères de l'Égypte ancienne à nos jours - Colette Bitsch : Le Maître du codex Cocharelli. Enlumineur et pionnier dans l'observation des insectes - Marie Bouchet: Nabokov's Text under the Microscope. Textual Practices of Detail in his Lepidopterological and Fictional Writings - Catherine Lanone: A Way of Seeing. From Eleanor Ormerod's Injurious Insects to Virginia Woolf's Butterflies - Yvonne Reddick: 'The Hanged Man and the Dragonfly'. Aquatic Insects and Metamorphosis in the Works of Ted Hughes - Romi S. Mukherjee: Love, Cannibalism, and the Sacred. Roger Caillois and the Myth of the Praying - Patricia Paillot: Fusion et confusion. L'homme-insecte dans The Fly de David Cronenberg - Hélène Machinal: Detectives, Beetles and Scientists. 'A Pin, a Cork, and a Card, and We Add Him to the Baker Street Collection' - Gilles Menegaldo: Ants on Hollywood Screens. Monstrous Mutations and Projected Fears (Them! and Phase IV) - Virgil W. Brower: Beeing and Time. A Kiss of Chemoreception, A Taste of Trophallaxis (and the Bug in Dasein's Mouth) - Wendy Harding: Insects and Texts. Worlds Apart? - Anne Mccrary Sullivan: Entomology Cabinet. A Poet's Collection.