Rachel Murray’s The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form provides a valuable contribution to modernist studies because Murray explains how the field of entomology, which rose in popularity as a result of the First World War, informed modernist aesthetics. The study illustrates the benefits of greening modernism, a recent turn that has moved scholars from studying the city and human psyche in modernist texts to focusing on the intersection of modernism and the natural world. However, Murray’s accessible and fascinating study makes it clear that such a move does not ignore human subjects. Instead, it reveals the complex entanglement of humans with the environment. Murray concentrates on Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, H.D., and Samuel Beckett, all of whose experimental work helped to define high Anglo-modernism. She claims that “the figure of the exoskeleton (or outer shell) can shed new light on modernism’s linguistic and formal innovations, its engagement with...
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