Worm Work: Recasting Romanticism

(Paperback)

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Worms. Natural history is riddled with them. Literature is crawling with them. From antiquity to today, the ubiquitous worm provokes an immediate discomfort and unconscious distancing: it remains us against them in anthropocentric anxiety. 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.

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"Worm Work is sophisticated and full of unexpected analytic insights. Animal studies have in general been preoccupied by big animals and the nineteenth century, so it is important and refreshing to go a little further back in time and down the great chain of being to see how the lower animals have shaped, and been shaped by, cultural standards."Charlotte Sleigh, author of Six Legs Better: A Cultural History of Myrmecology

Author Bio

Janelle A. Schwartz is visiting assistant professor of comparative literature at Hamilton College.