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ABOUT THIS BOOKThe novel? In ants? Perhaps it sounds just the tiniest bit strange. But, really, it makes perfect sense when you recall that ants live in an almost exclusively female society. And as Ian Watt noted long ago in The Rise of the Novel, the majority of eighteenth century novels were written by—as well as read by—women. The prevalence of women as readers and authors of fiction has continued to the present day. Within their all-female society, ants have conflicts, ants have ambitions and disappointments, ants have victories and defeats. Inhabiting an underground fortress of winding, labyrinthine galleries, ants can be gothic or postmodernist as the plot requires. For them the above-ground world of predators and enemies has a painful realism when it is not violently picaresque. Imagine translating Jane Austen into ants: your six-legged heroine will have not one or two but hundreds of gossiping, posturing, romantically and socially ambitious sisters, all striving to get precedence of one another. Or don't bother imagining it for yourself—just read A History of the Novel in Ants. Ants are social animals, like us, forming tiny but highly complex societies underneath our feet, above our heads, or sometimes within our walls, cellars, decks and floorboards. Within those societies, their behavior is not more meaningless, trivial or unintelligent than our own. And who is to say that they do not consider themselves to be very important, masters of their universe, such as it is? Carol Hart is a freelance science writer with a rusty PhD in English Literature. She reads a great many novels and she never steps on ants. This is her first novel. PREVIEW THIS BOOK |
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| A HISTORY OF THE NOVEL IN ANTS Carol Hart SpringStreet Books, July 2010, 320 pages, retail: $18.50 USD ISBN: 978-0-9795204-3-3 |
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