Description
Book SynopsisAvian Aesthetics in Literature and Culture: Birds and Humans in the Popular Imagination closes the gap between ornithological and humanities knowledge. This book contains fifteen innovative essays that bridge various environment-focused perspectives and methodologies in order to include birds in current conversations within the field of animal studies. This collection challenges species centrism, advances a biodiverse ontology, and embraces bird-centered topics as diverse as gaming, comic strips, window collisions, conservation literature, youth birding, mourning theory, and the “Birds Aren’t Real” movement.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Continuous Line Between Birds and Humans in Animal Studies Today
Danette DiMarco and Timothy Ruppert
SECTION 1 - The Avian-ness of Aesthetics
Chapter 1: Birdwatching and Wordwatching: The Avian Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway
Jemma Deer
Chapter 2
Birds as Character, Motif, Allusion, and Symbol in Meir Shalev’s A Pigeon and a Boy
Laura Major
Chapter 3: “With An Aviary Inside Its Head”: Surrealist Sensibilities and Avian Ontologies in the Work of J. G. Ballard and Ted Hughes
Declan Lloyd
Chapter 4: The Optimism of Flight: Magical Realism in Little Nemo in Slumberland
Mark O’Connor
SECTION 2 - Writing About/Like Birds
Chapter 5: The Fate of Birds in Anatole France’s Penguin Island
Timothy Ruppert
Chapter 6: Of Curlews and Crows: Representations of Avian Cognition in North American Animal Stories
Jennifer Schell
Chapter 7: What is it like to write (like) a bird?: Rethinking Literary Practice to Support Avian Subjectivity
Joshua Lobb
Chapter 8: Margaret Atwood’s Bird Narratives
Danette DiMarco
SECTION 3 - Entangled Worlds
Chapter 9: The Peregrine: At the Intersection of Ecocriticism and New Nature Writing
Debarati Bandyopadhyay
Chapter 10: Helen Macdonald, T. H. White, and Hawks: H is [also] for History
Louis J. Boyle
Chapter 11: Across So Wide a Sea: Humans, Seabirds, and the Kinship of Mortality
Keri Stevenson
Chapter 12: Collisions in Contemporary American Poetry
Calista McRae
SECTION 4 - Consumers Consuming Birds
Chapter 13: “Their Little Brethren of the Air”: Rhetoric of Youth Birding in the United States, 1890s-Present
Laura McGrath
Chapter 14: Birds Aren’t Real: Narrative and Aesthetic Irony in For-Profit Conspiracy
Lauren Shoemaker
Chapter 15: Laying Eggs: Ludothematic Resonance and the Birds of Wingspan
Christopher Moore
