Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature

This book examines literary representations of birds from across the world in anage of expanding European colonialism. It offers important new perspectives intothe ways birds populate and generate cultural meaning in a variety of literary andnon-literary genres from 1700-1840 as well as throughout a broad range ofecosystems and bioregions. It considers a wide range of authors, including someof the most celebrated figures in eighteenth-century literature such as John Gay, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Cowper, MaryWollstonecraft, Thomas Bewick, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, andGilbert White.

1. Introduction; Brycchan Carey, Sayre Greenfield, and Anne Milne. - 2. Avian Encounters and Moral Sentiment in Poetry from Eighteenth-Century Ireland; Lucy Collins. - 3. Ortolans, Partridges, and Pullets: Birds as Prey in Henry Fielding s
Tom Jones
; Leslie Aronson. - 4. `In Clouds Unnumber d : Anna Letitia Barbauld s `Birds and Insects , Speculative Ecology, and the Politics of Naturalism; D. T. Walker. - 5. Charlotte Smith and the Nightingale; Bethan Roberts. - 6. The Labouring-Class Bird; Nancy M. Derbyshire. - 7. The Language of Birds and the Language of Real Men: Wordsworth, Coleridge and the `Best Part of Language; Francesca Mackenney. - 8. `No Parrot, Either in Morality or Sentiment : Talking Birds and Mechanical Copying in the Age of Sensibility; Alex Wetmore. - 9. Placing Birds in Place: Reading Habitat in Beilby s and Bewick s
History of British Birds;
Anne Milne. - 10. The Literary Gilbert White; Brycchan Carey. - 11. When Poet Meets Penguin: British Verse Confronts Exotic Avifauna; Sayre Greenfield. - 12. Bird Metaphors in Racialised Ethnographic Description, c. 1700 1800' ; George T. Newberry. - 13. `The Incomparable Curiosity of Every Feather! : Cotton Mather s Birds; Nicholas Junkerman. - 14. The Passenger Pigeon and the New World Myth of Plenitude; Kevin Joel Berland.