Worm work
Subtitle: recasting Romanticism
By: Janelle A. Schwartz
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Minneapolis
Language: eng
Number of pages: 277
ISBN-13: 9780816673209; 9780816673216
Subjects: Literature and science; Nature in literature; Romanticism; History
Description: Worms. Natural history is riddled with them. Literature is crawling with them. From antiquity to today, the ubiquitous and multiform worm provokes an immediate discomfort and unconscious distancing: it remains us against them in anthropocentric anxiety. So there is always something muddled, or dirty, or even offensive when talking about worms. Rehabilitating the lowly worm into a powerful aesthetic trope, Janelle A. Schwartz proposes a new framework for understanding such a strangely animate nature. Worms, she declares, are the very matter with which the Romantics rethought the relationship between a material world in constant flux and the human mind working to understand it.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Transitional tropes: the nature of life in European romantic thought; title: "Unchanging but in form": the aesthetic episteme of Erasmus Darwin; title: "Not without some repugnancy, and a fluctuating mind": Trembley's polyp and the practice of eighteenth-century taxonomy; title: "Art thou but a worm?": Blake and the question concerning taxonomy; title: A diet of worms; or, Frankenstein and the matter of a vile romanticism.