Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature

Brycchan Carey is Professor of English at Northumbria University, Newcastleupon Tyne, UK. The author of numerous publications on eighteenth-centuryliterature and culture, his monographs include British Abolitionism and theRhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (2005) andFrom Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery,1657–1761 (2012).Sayre Greenfield is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh atGreensburg, USA. He has been a research fellow at Chawton House Library andhas recently contributed an essay on Shakespearean allusions to The CambridgeGuide to the Worlds of Shakespeare and various essays on Austen to Persuasions:The Jane Austen Journal. He is also the co-editor of Jane Austen in Hollywood(2001) and the author of The Ends of Allegory (1998).Anne Milne is Lecturer at the University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada. Shewas a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society inMunich, Germany (2011) and published ‘Lactilla Tends Her Fav’rite Cow’: EcocriticalReadings of Animals and Women in Eighteenth-Century British Labouring-ClassWomen’s Poetry in 2008. Her research highlights animals, environment, and localcultural production in eighteenth-century British poetry.

• 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.