Description

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This book examines apian imagery-bees, drones, honey, and the hive-in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary and oral traditions. In England and the New World colonies during a critical period of expansion, the metaphor of this communal society faced unprecedented challenges even as it came to emblematize the process of colonization itself. The beehive connected the labor of those marginalized by race, class, gender, or species to larger considerations of sovereignty. This study examines the works of William Shakespeare; Francis Daniel Pastorius; Hopi, Wyandotte, and Pocasset cultures; John Milton; Hester Pulter; and Bernard Mandeville. Its contribution lies in its exploration of the simultaneously recuperative and destructive narratives that place the bee at the nexus of the human, the animal, and the environment. The book argues that bees play a central representational and physical role in shaping conflicts over hierarchies of the early transatlantic world.

About the Author

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Nicole A. Jacobs teaches in Women's, Gender & Queer Studies and English at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. Her articles have appeared in Studies in Philology, Criticism, The Shakespearean International Yearbook, Appositions, and the Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Animals.