Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory

Lucie Armitt (Lincoln University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.3: Scottish Writing and Culture, 400-present.
Vol. editors: Kate Ash-Irisarri (University of Edinburgh), Daniel Cook (University of Dundee), J. Derrick McClure (University of Aberdeen)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1984

Places

Scotland (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

Iain Banks is a writer whose work embraces darkness: the darkness of the gothic, of the postmodern, of the body in all its abject excesses. The Wasp Factory, his first novel, is characteristically dark and sets itself up as a hybrid form straddling the literary modes of the postmodern and the gothic. Frank Cauldhame, the central protagonist, is a disturbed young man in late adolescence who inhabits an all-male household comprising three sick members: himself, his disabled and, it turns out, psychologically disturbed father, and his criminally insane older brother, Eric. Frank is, more than most, branded by familial dysfunction. As he tells us: “I was never registered. I have no birth certificate, no National Insurance number...I…

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2469 words

Citation: Armitt, Lucie. "The Wasp Factory". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 March 2002 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8095, accessed 21 November 2024.]

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