Modernist Parasites

Sebastian Williams is assistant professor of English at Davis & Elkins College.

We tend to think of parasites as greedy, self-serving figures. Yet Modernist Parasites explores what these figures have given to, rather than taken from, literary writers. From the First World War poetry of Isaac Rosenberg to the experimental writing of Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, Williams argues that the figure of the parasite is central to modernist writers’ imagining of a relational, interdependent model of selfhood – one that productively troubles the liberal humanist conception of the self as bounded, singular, and autonomous. Readers of modernism, animal studies, and posthumanism will find much to draw on this generous and generative study of literary parasitism.

• Table of ContentsDedicationAcknowledgmentsList of FiguresIntroductionChapter 1: Contagion, Pests, and Parasites in Trench PoetryChapter 2: “The Million Enemies of the Earth”: Parasitism and Poverty in Great Depression Literature Chapter 3: “Monstrous Vermin”: Becoming the Modernist ParasiteChapter 4: “Parasitism & Prostitution—Or Negation”: The Parasite in Modernist FeminismChapter 5: The Tramp: Social Parasitism, Vagrancy, and HealthEpilogueBibliographyAbout the Author