Avian Aesthetics in Literature and Culture

Birds and Humans in the Popular Imagination

Danette DiMarco, Timothy Ruppert

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781978782778
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism & Nature
• Index: Literature

Avian 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 contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• The Avian-ness of Aesthetics
• Birdwatching and Wordwatching: The Avian Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway
• Birds as Character, Motif, Allusion, and Symbol in Meir Shalev’s A Pigeon and a Boy
• “With an Aviary Inside Its Head”: Surrealist Sensibilities and Avian Ontologies in the Work of J. G. Ballard and Ted Hughes
• The Optimism of Flight: Magical Realism in Little Nemo in Slumberland
• Writing About/Like Birds
• The Fate of Birds in Anatole France’s Penguin Island
• Of Curlews and Crows: Representations of Avian Cognition in North American Animal Stories
• What Is It Like to Write (Like) a Bird?: Rethinking Literary Practice to Support Avian Subjectivity
• Margaret Atwood’s Bird Narratives
• Entangled Worlds
• The Peregrine: At the Intersection of Ecocriticism and New Nature Writing
• Helen Macdonald, T. H. White, and Hawks: H is [also] for History
• Across So Wide a Sea: Humans, Seabirds, and the Kinship of Mortality
• Window Collisions in Contemporary American Poetry
• Consumers Consuming Birds
• “Their Little Brethren of the Air”: Rhetoric of Youth Birding in the United States, 1890s–Present
• Birds Aren’t Real: Narrative and Aesthetic Irony in For-Profit Conspiracy
• Laying Eggs: Ludothematic Resonance and the Birds of Wingspan
• Index
• About the Editors and Contributors