"In the first part of this lyrical synthesis of rhetoric, visual and postmodern theory, and cognitive science, Cristopher Hollingsworth reveals the structure behind his metaphor, redefining it as an aesthetically and philosophically potent tableau that he calls the Hive.

He traces the Hive's evolution in epic poetry from Homer to Milton, which establishes antithetical but complementary images of angelic and demonic bees that Swift, Mandeville, and Keats use variously to debate classical versus emerging ideas of the individual's relationship to society.

But the Hive becomes fully psychologized, Hollingsworth argues, only when its use by Conrad and Wells to explore Europe's colonial imagination of the Other is transformed by Kafka and Sartre into competing symbols of the modern self's existential condition."--BOOK JACKET.