In this first book to comprehensively explore the cultural and textual meanings of bugs, editor Eric Brown argues that insects are humanity's "other." In order to be experienced, the insect world must be mediated by art or technology (as in the case of an ant farm or Kafka's Metamorphoses) while humans observe, detached and fascinated. In eighteen original essays, this book illuminates the ways in which our human intellectual and cultural models have been influenced by the natural history of insects.