Worm Work

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 thehuman mind working to understand it.