Avian Aesthetics in Literature and Culture

"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 culturally—from powering flights of imagination to providing the most accessible entrance to the natural world—and 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 theoretical framework for avian study while at the same time creating space for a variety of disciplinary approaches. Through incisive and unapologetically tender engagement with avian aesthetics, the collection beautifully expands the scope of what is traditionally imagined as ‘environmental texts’ to undergird the often neglected reality that humans are always at once a part of nonhuman nature, with avian life offering us both a literal and figurative reminder of how fleeting this mutuality can seem in a modern and industrialized world. Traversing genre, ocean, and critical lens, the collection successfully enacts the very principle of entanglement that it seeks to articulate.”

-- Christine Cusick, Seton Hill University

Avian aestheticsis an important contribution to the field of ecocriticism, bridging academia and environmentalism, fostering transdisciplinary scholarship, placing birds at the center where they belong rather than the periphery they have sometimes been consigned to. It offers a wealth of perspectives that will be of interest to anyone concerned with representations of birds and human-bird relations in literature.

* Journal of Ecohumani