Avian Aesthetics in Literature and Culture challenges species centrism through essays that bridge various environment-focused perspectives and methodologies.

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.

Introduction: 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