Cockroach (Reaktion Books - Animal)

Cockroach (Reaktion Books - Animal)

Marion Copeland

Language: English

Pages: 200

ISBN: 186189192X

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


The cockroach could not have scuttled along, almost unchanged, for two hundred and fifty million years – some two hundred and forty-nine before man evolved – unless it was doing something right. It would be fascinating as well as instructive to have access to the cockroach’s own record of its life on earth, to know its point of view on evolution and species domination over the millennia. Such chronicles would perhaps radically alter our perceptions of the dinosaur’s span and importance – and that of our own development and significance. We might learn that throughout all these aeons, the dominant life form has been, if not the cockroach itself, then certainly the insect.

Attempts to chronicle the cockroach’s intellectual and emotional life have been made only within the last century when a scientist titled his essay on the cockroach "The Intellectual and Emotional World of the Cockroach", and artists as radically different as Franz Kafka and Don Marquis created equally memorable cockroach protagonists.

At least since Classical Greece, authors have brought cockroach characters into the foreground to speak for the weak and downtrodden, the outsiders, those forced to survive on the underside of dominant human cultures. Cockroaches have become the subjects of songs (La Cucaracha), have competed in "roachraces" and have even ended up in recipes. In this accessible, sympathetic and often humorous book, Marion Copeland examines the natural history, symbolism and cultural significance of this poorly understood and much-maligned insect.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Festival at Iowa State University. Hers is but one of many efforts to rehabilitate the image of the cockroach. Naturalists and entomologists like Berenbaum have tended to be a bit less biased than the average Westerner in their naming of cockroaches. As one cockroach character in Daniel Evan Weiss’s novel The Roaches Have No King says, ‘in 1758 a chap named Carolus Linnaeus decided to tidy the living world. From the [Latin] word Blatta, which means ‘shunning light,’ he stamped out this

offers a prayer for protection from the cockroach and the classical Greek scholar Diophanes suggested fresh guts of rams, full of dung, would attract cockroaches. Burying the guts along with the cockroaches who had taken the bait for two days would effectively suffocate ‘the Blats’.1 But not all literature cries out against the cockroach. Aesop’s one cockroach character takes revenge on the eagle who killed his friend the hare, one of the few creatures willing to give the cockroach asylum. When

from the sun.11 Mt Roachmore, another version of cockroach survival lore. David Quammen, whose ‘A Republic of Cockroaches: When the Ultimate Exterminator Meets the Ultimate Pest’ appeared in Outside magazine in May 1983, was inspired to write the essay by reading Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth, a non-fiction work that makes essentially the same apocalyptic prophecy Perkins makes in Bob Bridges. In his chapter ‘A Republic of Insects and Grasses’, Schell writes convincingly of the

ceiling and rocking back and forth. Being turned into a bug is a step UP for him.17 Three years earlier, her short story ‘My Life as a Bug’ illustrates the point. Smiley’s Gregor, like Marc Estrin’s Gregor, not dead at all, awakens in the dust-heap where the family’s housekeeper has disposed of him. Rather than seeming outsized and monstrous (views that reflected his family’s and society’s views of cockroaches), he and the landscape around him have been transformed by the light of the moon. He

Stephen Raleigh 99 Campbell, Joseph 81 Cannon, Janelle 36, 59, 154–7, 155 Crickwing 36, 154–7, 155 Carson, Rachel 157 Carvalho, Tina 30, 137, 164 Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio 145 Castillo, Anna 153 Catesby, Mark 51, 69 Chalmers, Catherine 41, 43, 61, 100, 113, 164 Child, Lincoln 85 Cisnernos, Sandra 111 Clark, David 58 Cleveland, Lemuel Roscoe 39, 135–6 Crompton, John 8, 9 Cockroach Hall of Fame, Dallas, Texas 63 Cockroach Picture Gallery, University of

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