Sebastian Williams is assistant professor of English at Davis & Elkins College in West Virginia.
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. -- Rachel Murray, University of Bristol