'Who reads Robinson Crusoe and wonders about sandflies, midges, and ticks? Who would ever have connected Austen's Emma and lice? Insects and the Enlightenment brings posthuman, biosemiotic, animal studies, and new materialist theory to bear on eighteenth-century literature, science, and culture in innovative and important ways.' Scott Hess, Professor of English and Environmental Sustainability, Earlham College 'Insects and the Enlightenment offers a captivating account of the swarms of creatures silenced, overlooked, or banished from the fictive worlds of eighteenth-century British literature. This pioneering work of scholarship compellingly argues for a new approach to realism, one capable of registering humanity's entanglement with- and dependence upon- forms of insect life strikingly alien to our own.' Lynn Festa, Distinguished Professor of English, Rutgers University