This book examines literary representations of birds from across the world in an age of expanding European colonialism. It offers important new perspectives into the ways birds populate and generate cultural meaning in a variety of literary and non-literary genres from 1700–1840 as well as throughout a broad range of ecosystems and bioregions. It considers a wide range of authors, including some of the most celebrated figures in eighteenth-century literature such as John Gay, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Cowper, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Bewick, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, and Gilbert White
Brycchan Carey is Professor of English at Northumbria University, Chair of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (UK and Ireland), and Vice-President of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. He is the author of British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760-1807 (Palgrave, 2005) and From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1658-1761 (Yale University Press, 2014). He is the editor of Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative (Oxford University Press, 2018), (with Nicole Aljoe and Thomas Krise) of Literary Histories of the Early Anglophone Caribbean: Islands in the Stream (Palgrave, 2018), (with Geoffrey Plank) of Quakers and Abolition (University of Illinois Press, 2014), (with Peter Kitson) of Slavery and the Cultures of Abolition: Essays Marking the British Abolition Act of 1807 (Boydell and Brewer, 2007), and (with Markman Ellis and Sara Salih) of Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its Colonies, 1760-1838 (Palgrave, 2004). As well as extensive work on the cultural history of slavery and abolition, he is currently completing a monograph on Caribbean natural histories (under contract to Yale University Press) and has published several articles on literature, science, and the environment in the long eighteenth century.
Sayre Nelson Greenfield is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh in Greensburg. He has been a recent research fellow at Chawton House Library, Chawton, England and has recently contributed to The Cambridge Shakespeare Encyclopedia, Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal, and The Sensational Centuries: Essays on the Enhancement of Sense Experience in the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries. Ed. Kevin L. Cope. New York: AMS Press, 2013. He is also the co-editor of Jane Austen in Hollywood (Kentucky 1998, 2nd ed. 2001) and the author of The Ends of Allegory (Delaware 1998).
Anne Milne is Lecturer in English at the University of Toronto Scarborough and an ecocritic who specializes in Restoration and eighteenth-century British literature. She was a 2010-2011 Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at the Ludwig Maximilians University and the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany and is the author of 'Lactilla Tends Her Fav'rite Cow': Ecocritical Readings of Animals and Women in Eighteenth-Century British Labouring-Class Women's Poetry (Bucknell, 2008). Her current research focuses on land-use transformation, local cultural production, and the role(s) of British eighteenth-century labouring-class poets in both shaping and being shaped by dynamic and often chaotic landscapes.