This book examines literary representations of birds from across the world in an

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

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.