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Palgrave Macmillan

Bees, Science, and Sex in the Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century

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  • © 2024

Overview

Editors:
  1. Alexis Harley

    1. La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia

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    You can also search for this editor in PubMed   Google Scholar

  2. Christopher Harrington

    1. La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia

    View editor publications

    You can also search for this editor in PubMed   Google Scholar

  • Cuts across apiology, the history of science, and ecocriticism
  • Foregrounds legal status of honeybees, presence of bees to democratic movements, print media, and canonical Literature
  • Contributes to the growing field of cultural entomology during the current mass extinction crisis

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature (PSAAL)

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Table of contents (11 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xiv
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  2. Stealing Sweetness: Science, Sex and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Bee

    • Christopher Harrington, Alexis Harley
    Pages 1-19

  3. Modern Science, Moral Lessons and Honey Bees in Nineteenth-Century Natural History

    • Diane M. Rodgers
    Pages 21-39

  4. Symbiosis or Slaughterhouse? Honeyed Analogy in Erasmus Darwin

    • Adam Komisaruk
    Pages 41-59

  5. The Social Insect and the Fashionable Newspaper: Reading Bee Poems in the World and the Morning Post

    • Claire Knowles
    Pages 61-76

  6. John Keats’s Honeybees: Sound, Passion, Medicine, and Natural Prophecy

    • Hermione de Almeida
    Pages 77-90

  7. “The Bees Seem Alive and Make a Great Buzzing”: Unsettling Homes in South-West Western Australia

    • Jessica White
    Pages 91-110

  8. “The Ideas Are in the Air”: From Drone Bees to Honey Women, Cultural Paradox in the Democratic Rhetoric of British Chartism and Colonial Australian Suffragism

    • Christopher Harrington
    Pages 111-131

  9. Housewives and Old Wives: Sex and Superstition in English Beekeeping

    • Adam Ebert
    Pages 133-150

  10. Bees in Nineteenth-Century Lore and Law

    • Katy Barnett
    Pages 151-168

  11. Thomas Hardy’s Bees, Sex, Domestication and Wildness

    • Alexis Harley
    Pages 169-186

  12. “Through the Agency of Bees”: Charles Darwin, John Lubbock, and the Secret Lives of Plants and People

    • Jonathan Smith
    Pages 187-208

  13. Back Matter

    Pages 209-230
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Keywords

About this book

The long nineteenth century (1789-1914) has been described as an axial age in the history of both bees and literature. It was the period in which the ecological and agronomic values that are still attributed to bees by modern industrial society were first established, and it was the period in which one bee species (the European honeybee) completed its dispersal to every habitable continent on Earth. At the same time, literature – which would enable, represent and in some cases repress or disavow this radical transformation of bees’ fortunes ­– was undergoing its own set of transformations. Bees, Science, and Sex in the Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century navigates the various developments that occurred in the scientific study of bees and in beekeeping during this period of remarkable change, focusing on the bees themselves, those with whom they lived, and how old and new ideas about bees found expression in an ever-diversifying range of literary media. Ranging across literary forms and genres, the studies in this volume show the ubiquity of bees in nineteenth-century culture, demonstrate the queer specificity of writing about and with bees, and foreground new avenues for research into an animal profoundly implicated in the political, economic, ecological, emotional and aesthetic conditions of the modern world.

Editors and Affiliations

  • La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia

    Alexis Harley, Christopher Harrington

About the editors

Alexis Harley lectures in literary studies at La Trobe University, Australia. She is the author of Autobiologies: Charles Darwin and the Natural History of the Self. She has kept honeybees since 2012. 

Christopher Harrington teaches literary studies at Victoria University in Melbourne. He has published numerous articles on the representation of bees and insects in literature.


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