Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature

Reason, Emotion, and Ornithology, 1700–1840

Brycchan Carey, Sayre Greenfield, Anne Milne, Brycchan Carey, Sayre Greenfield, Anne Milne

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783030327910
• eBook ISBN: 9783030327927
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This book examines literary representations of birds from across the world in an age of expanding European colonialism. It offers important new perspectives into the ways birds populate and generate cultural meaning in a variety of literary and non-literary genres from 1700–1840 as well as throughout a broad range of ecosystems and bioregions. It considers a wide range of authors, including some of the most celebrated figures in eighteenth-century literature such as John Gay, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Cowper, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Bewick, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, and Gilbert White.
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© The Author(s) 2020

B. Carey et al. (eds.)Birds in Eighteenth-Century LiteraturePalgrave Studies in Animals and Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Brycchan Carey¹ , Sayre Greenfield² and Anne Milne³

(1)

Department of Humanities, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

(2)

Division of Humanities, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, Greensburg, PA, USA

(3)

Department of English, University of Toronto Scarborough, Toronto, ON, Canada

Brycchan Carey (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Sayre Greenfield

Email: [email protected]

Anne Milne

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Birds and words: of all the attributes birds have—song, colour, flavour, and those distinctive modified scales, feathers—one thing they do not have, except by human imposition, is words. This book is about that imposition—about the conjunction of two very different sorts of species at a time when their relationship was changing drastically. The chapters in this volume map out many aspects of that change. Some focus on a single species, or even an individual bird. Others consider literary representations of birds more broadly or alongside other forms of writing about nature. All explore the tension in literature of this period between a utilitarian view of birds and the trend towards granting birds their own ontological status. That is, birds move from serving mankind (literally, metaphorically, or even spiritually) to birds having their own independent existence that humans can perceive, sympathise with, rhapsodise about, or categorise, but that is indeed separate. One might say that birds start as feathered extensions of human concerns but, paradoxically at a time of accelerating scientific understanding, become a highly visible and audible way for the eighteenth century to grasp, a little, its own incomprehension of the natural world.

From a modern point of view, the most significant development of the eighteenth century so far as changing attitudes to birds is concerned is the scientific one. The view of birds as part of God’s creation maintains itself in this period, but, as the details of ornithology accumulate, the power of birds to illustrate divine power and ingenuity becomes less foregrounded among the details of avian life. Literature, by nature conservative in its preservation of metaphoric applications of birds and its repetition of avian motifs, may seem somewhat detached from this movement. Pre-Christian and early Christian applications of bird images and medieval motifs repeat themselves, but with an increasing difference that makes it harder and harder, as the century proceeds, to dissolve the birds into their metaphors. Birds gain an ever-increasing life of their own, not just part of the divine world or the human world, but with an existence in the natural world that demands increasing attention. That natural world, too, becomes increasingly dynamic in the avian-enhanced view, not existing in the same state throughout human experience, but changing by its own rhythms and with human interference.

Inevitably, literature is called to account. For example, in 1777, John Aikin urges studious poetic engagement with natural history in An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry. He praises James Thomson as the only ‘painter of rural beauty’ since Theocritus to have ‘look[ed] abroad into the face of nature’.¹ Despite this anthropomorphic metaphor, Aikin meticulously documents a series of erroneous literary renderings of animal behaviours and natural phenomena, pointing out the disfiguring effects of figurative language. Aikin is well aware that his call is further compromised by the creative impulses of some self-styled natural historians. In one example, he specifically points to Oliver Goldsmith, suggesting that Goldsmith is ‘a Naturalist only of the Bookseller’s making [who] has many descriptions in his History of Animated Nature that are wrought with peculiar warmth of fancy and strength of colouring’.² While Aikin lands firmly on the side of science informing literature, his admonishment of Goldsmith invites greater critical engagement with the experiential processes and underlying practices of representing nature. Such an ecocritical turn at the end of the eighteenth century points to the complexity of unpacking and engaging with literary relationships with birds. The aim of this collection is both to detail bird-human interactions as they were experienced in the eighteenth century and to join a complementary conversation with other recent animal studies, ecocritical, and ecofeminist monographs and collections that focus on British and American cultures of nature before 1900.

To that end, this collection enacts the dynamic movement from what Lawrence Buell calls ‘first-wave ecocriticism’, which tends towards identifying and celebrating representations of nature in literary works, to what he calls ‘second-wave ecocriticism’, a development in the discipline that enacts greater scepticism and critical engagement with the relationships between environmental science, environmental political ‘movements’, and literary and cultural products.³ While all of the chapters in this collection can be described as ecocritical, some do the ‘first-wave’ work of identifying (and indeed celebrating) representations of birds in eighteenth-century literature, while others, especially those by Collins (Chap. 2), Aronson (Chap. 3), Derbyshire (Chap. 6), Milne (Chap. 9), and Newberry (Chap. 12), engage directly with issues current in animal studies, ecofeminism, bioregionalism, and intersectional analysis. What all the chapters in the collection enthusiastically respond to is the ‘largely untapped’ potential ‘for ecocritical approaches to [mostly] British literature between 1660 and 1800’ forcefully underlined by Christopher Hitt in his 2004 essay, ‘Ecocriticism and the Long Eighteenth Century’.⁴

If broad ecocritical studies of the long eighteenth century remain scarce, critical literature dealing specifically with birds in this period is even sparser, despite the appearance in recent years of a small number of important interventions from the wider perspective of animal studies. There are, in fact, few book-length studies of birds in the literature of any period, and none that the editors are aware of that specifically address the eighteenth century. Of those that consider the bird in literature more generally, most are aimed at a popular audience, often simply anthologising poetry and quotations from longer works. A small number have attempted to synthesise the contributions of birds to British culture more broadly. Of these, Edward A. Armstrong’s The Life and Lore of the Bird in Nature, Art, Myth, and Literature (1975), Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey’s Birds Britannica (2005), and Cocker’s Birds and People (2013) have been most successful, but all include eighteenth-century material alongside material from the whole of British cultural history and are often stronger on folklore than literature (Armstrong also contributed the important Folklore of Birds to the New Naturalists series in 1958). Leonard Lutwack’s Birds in Literature (1994) remains the best-known general scholarly study but is not strong on eighteenth-century literature. Several books deal with birds in the literature of Romanticism, at least in passing, including David Perkins’s Romanticism and Animal Rights (2003), Dewey W. Hall’s, Romantic Naturalists, Early Environmentalists: An Ecocritical Study, 1789–1912 (2014), and, less convincingly, Thomas C. Gannon’s Skylark Meets Meadowlark: Reimagining the Bird in British Romantic and Contemporary Native American Literature (2009). In addition, there have been several studies of birds in the poetry of John Clare, most notably Eric Robinson and Richard Fitter’s John Clare’s Birds (1982). At the other end of the eighteenth century, there are also a handful of studies of the bird in medieval and early modern literature including, predictably, several that deal with birds in Shakespeare.

Studies of animals in eighteenth-century culture are nevertheless on the increase, although important recent books such as Nathaniel Wolloch’s Subjugated Animals: Animals And Anthropocentrism in Early Modern European Culture (2006) and Laura Brown’s Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination (2010) have been distinctly mammalian and mostly disregard birds. A 2010 special issue of The Journal for Eighteenth-Century S...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Avian Encounters and Moral Sentiment in Poetry from Eighteenth-Century Ireland
• 3. Ortolans, Partridges, and Pullets: Birds as Prey in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones
• 4. ‘In Clouds Unnumber’d’: Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ‘Birds and Insects’, Speculative Ecology, and the Politics of Naturalism
• 5. Charlotte Smith and the Nightingale
• 6. The Labouring-Class Bird
• 7. The Language of Birds and the Language of Real Men: Wordsworth, Coleridge and the ‘Best Part’ of Language
• 8. ‘No Parrot, Either in Morality or Sentiment’: Talking Birds and Mechanical Copying in the Age of Sensibility
• 9. Placing Birds in Place: Reading Habitat in Beilby’s and Bewick’s History of British Birds
• 10. The Literary Gilbert White
• 11. When Poet Meets Penguin: British Verse Confronts Exotic Avifauna
• 12. Bird Metaphors in Racialised Ethnographic Description, c. 1700–1800
• 13. ‘The Incomparable Curiosity of Every Feather!’: Cotton Mather’s Birds
• 14. The Passenger Pigeon and the New World Myth of Plenitude
• Back Matter