Avian Aesthetics in Literature and Culture: Birds and Humans in the Popular Imagination [Paperback]

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 Arent Real movement.

Danette DiMarco is professor of English at Slippery Rock University.
Timothy Ruppert is assistant professor of English at Slippery Rock University.

These essays constitute an intense and fascinating study of the strangeness of birds and the variety of ways writers and other cultural creators try to comprehend and represent them. This book provides enlightening considerations of what birds do for us culturallyfrom powering flights of imagination to providing the most accessible entrance to the natural worldand what we do to birds as we mistakenly humanize them and directly or indirectly destroy them. Sayre Greenfield, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg

Avian Aesthetics offers a valuable contribution to animal studies and the environmental humanities, exploring the 'multispecies entanglements' of people and birds in literature, art and media from a variety of productive angles. The writers collectively make a potent case for the need to think more deeply and broadly about the relations between the human and avian imaginary. Alex Wetmore, University of the Fraser Valley and author of Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature

Avian Aesthetics is a careful compilation that is informed by a nuanced understanding of environmental studies, and the particularities of avian studies within. DiMarco and Ruppert establish a firm tl£2