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 multicultural 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, nonwestern 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.
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