A Native rereading of both British Romanticism and mainstream Euro-American ecocriticism, this cross-cultural transatlantic study of literary imaginings about birds sets the agenda for a more sophisticated and nuanced ecocriticism. Lakota critic Thomas C. Gannon explores how poets and nature writers in Britain and Native America have incorporated birds into their writings. He discerns an evolution in humankind's representations--and attitudes toward--other species by examining the avian images and tropes in British Romantic and Native American literatures, and by considering how such literary tr.

"Scarlet Experiment explores how humanity's relationship with birds has been influenced by governmental agencies, literary renderings, and the conservation movement and uses six bird species to study the management of bird life in America from the nineteenth century to the present"--

AøNative rereading of both British Romanticism and mainstream Euro-American ecocriticism, this cross-cultural transatlantic study of literary imaginings about birds sets the agenda for a more sophisticated and nuanced ecocriticism. Lakota critic Thomas C. Gannon explores how poets and nature writersøin Britain and Native America have incorporated birds into their writings. He discerns an evolution in humankind?s representations?and attitudes toward?other species by examining the avian images and tropes in British Romantic and Native American literatures, and by considering how such literary treatment succeeds from an ecological or animal-rights perspective. ø Such depictions, Gannon argues, reveal much about underlying cultural and historical relationships with the Other?whether other species or other peoples. He elucidates the changing interconnections between birds and humans in British Romanticism from Cowper to Clare, with particular attention to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Keats. Gannon then considers how birds are imagined by Native writers, including early Lakota authors and contemporary poets such as Linda Hogan and Joy Harjo. Ultimately he shows how the sensitive and far-reaching connections with nature forged by Native American writers encourage a more holistic reimagining of humankind?s relationship to other animals.

Does it matter when and where a poem was written? Or on what kind of paper? How do the author's ideas about inspiration or how a poem should be written precondition the moment of putting pen to paper? This monograph explores these questions in offering the first full-length study of Ted Hughes's poetic process. Hughes's extensive archives held in the UK and US form the basis of the book's unique exploration of his writing process. It analyses Hughes's techniques throughout his career, arguing that his self-conscious experimentation with the processes by which he wrote profoundly affected both the style and subject matter of his work. The book considers Hughes's changing ideas about how poetry 'ought' to be written, discussing how these affect his creative process. It presents a fresh exploration of Hughes's major collections across the span of his career to build a detailed illustration of how his writing methods altered. The book thus restores the materiality of paper and ink to Hughes's poems, reading their histories, the stories they tell of their composition, and of the intellectual and creative environments in which they were gestated, born and matured. In the process, it offers a template for new approaches in authorship studies, reframing one of the twentieth century's most iconic literary figures through the unseen histories of his creative process.

Ornithologies of Desire develops ecocritical reading strategies that engage scientific texts, field guides, and observation. Focusing on poetry about birds and birdwatching, this book argues that attending to specific details about the physical world when reading environmentally conscious poetry invites a critical humility in the face of environmental crises and evolutionary history. The poetry and poetics of Don McKay provide Ornithologies of Desire with its primary subject matter, which is predicated on attention to ornithological knowledge and avian metaphors. This focus on birds enables a consideration of more broadly ecological relations and concerns, since an awareness of birds in their habitats insists on awareness of plants, insects, mammals, rocks, and all else that constitutes place. The book’s chapters are organized according to: apparatus (that is, science as ecocritical tool), flight, and song. Reading McKay’s work alongside ecology and ornithology, through flight and birdsong, both challenges assumptions regarding humans’ place in the earth system and celebrates the sheer virtuosity of lyric poetry rich with associative as well as scientific details. The resulting chapters, interchapter, and concordance of birds that appear in McKay’s poetry encourage amateurs and specialists, birdwatchers and poetry readers, to reconsider birds in English literature on the page and in the field.

The contemporary novel is not as silent as we tend to believe, nor does it only attend to human plots and characters. As this book shows, writers in a range of subgenres have devoted considerable attention to the voices of nonhuman animals, and to the histories and technologies of listening that shape twenty-first-century cultures and environments. In doing so, their multispecies novels illuminate the cultural meanings we attach to creatures like dogs, frogs, whales, chimpanzees, and Tasmanian tigers – not to mention various bird species and even plants. At the same time, these stories explore the attitudes of distinct communities of human listeners, ranging from vets and musicians to chimp caretakers and sonar technicians. In highlighting animal sounds and their cultural meanings, these novels by authors including Amitav Ghosh, Julia Leigh, Richard Powers, Karen Joy Fowler, Cormac McCarthy, and Han Kang also enrich pressing debates about species extinction, sound pollution, nonhuman communication, and human-animal relations. As we are violently reshaping the planet, they invite us to reimagine our own humanity and animality – and to rethink how we tell stories about multispecies contact zones and their complex soundscapes.

Reading Literary Animals explores the status and representation of animals in literature from the Middle Ages to the present day. Essays by leading scholars in the field examine various figurative, agential, imaginative, ethical, and affective aspects of literary encounters with animality, showing how practices of close reading provoke new ways of thinking about animals and the texts in which they appear. Through investigations of works by Shakespeare, Aphra Behn, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, and Ted Hughes, among many others, Reading Literary Animals demonstrates the value of distinctively literary animal studies.