Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Reason, Emotion, and Ornithology, 17001840 (Palgrave Studies in Animals and 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. ignwogwog[p Front Matter ....Pages i-xiv Introduction (Brycchan Carey, Sayre Greenfield, Anne Milne)....Pages 1-15 Avian Encounters and Moral Sentiment in Poetry from Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Lucy Collins)....Pages 17-37 Ortolans, Partridges, and Pullets: Birds as Prey in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (Leslie Aronson)....Pages 39-50 ‘In Clouds Unnumber’d’: Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ‘Birds and Insects’, Speculative Ecology, and the Politics of Naturalism (D. T. Walker)....Pages 51-70 Charlotte Smith and the Nightingale (Bethan Roberts)....Pages 71-89 The Labouring-Class Bird (Nancy M. Derbyshire)....Pages 91-110 The Language of Birds and the Language of Real Men: Wordsworth, Coleridge and the ‘Best Part’ of Language (Francesca Mackenney)....Pages 111-129 ‘No Parrot, Either in Morality or Sentiment’: Talking Birds and Mechanical Copying in the Age of Sensibility (Alex Wetmore)....Pages 131-150 Placing Birds in Place: Reading Habitat in Beilby’s and Bewick’s History of British Birds (Anne Milne)....Pages 151-171 The Literary Gilbert White (Brycchan Carey)....Pages 173-192 When Poet Meets Penguin: British Verse Confronts Exotic Avifauna (Sayre Greenfield)....Pages 193-209 Bird Metaphors in Racialised Ethnographic Description, c. 1700–1800 (George T. Newberry)....Pages 211-229 ‘The Incomparable Curiosity of Every Feather!’: Cotton Mather’s Birds (Nicholas Junkerman)....Pages 231-246 The Passenger Pigeon and the New World Myth of Plenitude (Kevin Joel Berland)....Pages 247-267 Back Matter ....Pages 269-284