Birds in Literature

Although they are as commonplace as our backyards, birds remain wild, unpossessed by humans, living "beside us, but alone", as Matthew Arnold observes and as Leonard Lutwack explores in this study of the depiction of birds in literature. The very attributes that make birds so familiar - their flight and song - retain an air of mystery that sets them apart from other animals. They appear to exist effortlessly in a state of mixed animal and spiritual being that humans long to attain. This simultaneous familiarity and transcendence gives birds a wide range of meaning in the works that Luwack describes. His examples - both expected and surprising - come in some measure from Greco-Roman writers but primarily from the poetry and prose of American and British writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Lutwack divides his material into five sections: birds in poetry and as metaphor, including the classical nightingale and the swan and the birds of such poets as Dickinson, Whitman, and Stevens; birds and the,supernatural, including ancient beliefs in birds as images and disguised gods as well as some interesting modern revivals of bird-gods - the quetzal in Lawrence, the crow in Ted Hughes, and the hawk in Jeffers; birds that are trapped, hunted, or killed in sacrifice, such as Coleridge's albatross, Ibsen's wild duck, Chekhov's seagull, and Kosinski's painted bird; birds and the erotic, with special emphasis on Lawrence's juxtaposition of birds and lovers, the association of white birds with chastity, and the traditional identification of women with docile birds and men with raptors; and a section on literature and the future of birds that includes strategies for dealing with theincreasing threat to real birds posed by humans. Literature has made and must continue to make the reading public sensitive to nature, Lutwack writes, and literary birds may prove to be our best link to it.

Birds is generally recognized as one of Aristophanes' masterpieces, for its imaginative plot (it is the source of the word "Cloudcuckooland"), and its charming and original lyrics. This abridgement of Nan Dunbar's widely acclaimed edition of Birds, published in 1995, preserves all the material designed to help the less advanced student of Greek or the non-specialist to translate, understand, and enjoy the play. It also retains the notes on staging, but the metrical, textual, and ornithological problems are dealt with more summarily, and purely illustrative parallels are omitted.

This Companion consists of 14 essays by leading international scholars. They provide a series of new perspectives on one of the most enigmatic and controversial American writers. Specially tailored to the needs of undergraduates, the essays examine all of Poe's major writings, his poetry, short stores and criticism, and place his work in a variety of literary, cultural and political contexts. This volume will be of interest to scholars as well as students. It features a detailed chronology and a comprehensive guide to further reading.

James O'Rourke examines the ways in which the modern reception to Keats's major odes reveals the investments made in these poems by successive generations of critical schools, particularly New Criticism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and New Historicism. O'Rourke's reading of the odes locates them within the contexts of literary and cultural history and recovers the innovative force of the poems in a way that speaks to the aesthetics and the politics of the present.

While the themes of Keats's odes are characteristically Romantic, they are also very modern. O'Rourke's analysis shows how such familiar Romantic themes as the pathos of solitude ("Ode to a Nightingale"), the inaccessibility of the past ("Ode on a Grecian Urn"), the excess of melancholia ("Ode on Melancholy"), and the beneficence of nature ("To Autumn") become culturally coded as "female", and he demonstrates how they confront the reader with familiar ideas in surprisingly fresh forms. This original study does much to illuminate what Keats's,most virtuosic work has to say about history, nature, gender, ourselves, and each other.

The moving and beautiful autobiography of a talented black woman. ". . . I have no words for this achievement, but I know that not since the days of my childhood . . . have I found myself so moved . . . Her portrait is a Biblical study of life in the midst of death".--James Baldwin.