Birdsong, Speech and Poetry

Birdsong, Speech and Poetry PDF Author: Francesca Mackenney
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009084089
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
In the long nineteenth century, scientists discovered striking similarities between how birds learn to sing and how children learn to speak. Tracing the 'science of birdsong' as it developed from the 'ingenious' experiments of Daines Barrington to the evolutionary arguments of Charles Darwin, Francesca Mackenney reveals a legacy of thought which informs, and consequently affords fresh insights into, a canonical group of poems about birdsong in the Romantic and Victorian periods. With a particular focus on the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Wordsworth siblings, John Clare and Thomas Hardy, her book explores how poets responded to an analogy which challenged definitions of language and therefore of what it means to be human. Drawing together responses to birdsong in science, music and poetry, her distinctive interdisciplinary approach challenges many of the long-standing cultural assumptions which have shaped (and continue to shape) how we respond to other creatures in the Anthropocene.

Birdsong, Speech and Poetry

Birdsong, Speech and Poetry PDF Author: Francesca Mackenney
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009084089
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Get Book

Book Description
In the long nineteenth century, scientists discovered striking similarities between how birds learn to sing and how children learn to speak. Tracing the 'science of birdsong' as it developed from the 'ingenious' experiments of Daines Barrington to the evolutionary arguments of Charles Darwin, Francesca Mackenney reveals a legacy of thought which informs, and consequently affords fresh insights into, a canonical group of poems about birdsong in the Romantic and Victorian periods. With a particular focus on the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Wordsworth siblings, John Clare and Thomas Hardy, her book explores how poets responded to an analogy which challenged definitions of language and therefore of what it means to be human. Drawing together responses to birdsong in science, music and poetry, her distinctive interdisciplinary approach challenges many of the long-standing cultural assumptions which have shaped (and continue to shape) how we respond to other creatures in the Anthropocene.

Sung Birds

Sung Birds PDF Author: Elizabeth Eva Leach
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501727575
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Is birdsong music? The most frequent answer to this question in the Middle Ages was resoundingly "no." In Sung Birds, Elizabeth Eva Leach traces postmedieval uses of birdsong within Western musical culture. She first explains why such melodious sound was not music for medieval thinkers and then goes on to consider the ontology of music, the significance of comparisons between singers and birds, and the relationship between art and nature as enacted by the musical performance of late-medieval poetry. If birdsong was not music, how should we interpret the musical depiction of birdsong in human music-making? What does it tell us about the singers, their listeners, and the moral status of secular polyphony? Why was it the fourteenth century that saw the beginnings of this practice, continued to this day in the music of Messiaen and others?Leach explores medieval arguments about song, language, and rationality whose basic terms survive undiminished into the present. She considers not only lyrics that have their singers voice the songs or speech of birds but also those that represent other natural, nonmusical, sounds such as human cries or the barks of dogs. The dangerous sweetness of birdsong was invoked in discussions of musical ethics, which, because of the potential slippage between irrational beast and less rational woman in comparisons with rational human masculinity, depict women's singing as less than fully human. Leach's argument comes full circle with the advent of sound recording. This technological revolution-like its medieval equivalent, the invention of the music book-once again made the relationship between music and nature an acute preoccupation of Western culture.

Negotiations

Negotiations PDF Author: Destiny O. Birdsong
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1951142136
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Full of wonder." —Elizabeth Acevedo A Best Book of the Year at BuzzFeed, Refinery29, and Entropy Magazine What makes a self? In her remarkable debut collection of poems, Destiny O. Birdsong writes fearlessly towards this question. Laced with ratchetry, yet hungering for its own respectability, Negotiations is about what it means to live in this America, about Cardi B and top-tier journal publications, about autoimmune disease and the speaker’s intense hunger for her own body—a surprise of self-love in the aftermath of both assault and diagnosis. It’s a series of love letters to black women, who are often singled out for abuse and assault, silencing and tokenism, fetishization and cultural appropriation in ways that throw the rock, then hide the hand. It is a book about tenderness and an indictment of people and systems that attempt to narrow black women’s lives, their power. But it is also an examination of complicity—both a narrative and a black box warning for a particular kind of self-healing that requires recognizing culpability when and where it exists.

Birdsongs

Birdsongs PDF Author: Betsy Franco
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0689877773
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 40

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Book Description
Throughout the day and into the night various birds sing their songs, beginning with the woodpecker who taps a pole ten times and counting down to the hummingbird who calls once.

Birdsong

Birdsong PDF Author: Ellie Sandall
Publisher: Egmontusa
ISBN: 9781606841938
Category : Birds
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A crowd of birds lands in a tree, sharing songs, until one last winged creature proves to be too much.

Biopolitics and Animal Species in Nineteenth Century Literature and Science

Biopolitics and Animal Species in Nineteenth Century Literature and Science PDF Author: Matthew Rowlinson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009409956
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Centring on Darwin and on literature throughout the nineteenth century, this book documents a general crisis in the species concept.

Sexual Restraint and Aesthetic Experience in Victorian Literary Decadence

Sexual Restraint and Aesthetic Experience in Victorian Literary Decadence PDF Author: Sarah Green
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108918123
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Can sexual restraint be good for you? Many Victorians thought so. This book explores the surprisingly positive construction of sexual restraint in an unlikely place: late nineteenth-century Decadence. Reading Decadent texts alongside Victorian writing about sexual health, including medical literature, adverts, advice books, and periodical articles, it identifies an intellectual Paterian tradition of sensuous continence, in which 'healthy' pleasure is distinguished from its 'harmful' counterpart. Recent work on Decadent sexuality concentrates on transgression and subversion, with restraint interpreted ahistorically as evidence of repression/sublimation or queer coding. Here Sarah Green examines the work of Walter Pater, Lionel Johnson, Vernon Lee, and George Moore to outline a co-extensive alternative approach to sexuality where restraint figured as a productive part of the 'aesthetic life', or a practical ethics shaped by aesthetic principles. Attending to this tradition reveals neglected connections within and beyond Decadence, bringing fresh perspective to its late nineteenth- and twentieth-century reception.

Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies

Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies PDF Author: Charles Martindale
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108835899
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
The first collected study of Pater's significance to criticism, revealing his pivotal role in establishing principles of the literary essay.

Scale, Crisis, and the Modern Novel

Scale, Crisis, and the Modern Novel PDF Author: Aaron Rosenberg
Publisher:
ISBN: 1009271822
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
At the turn of the twentieth century, novelists faced an unprecedented crisis of scale. While exponential increases in industrial production, resource extraction, and technological complexity accelerated daily life, growing concerns about deep time, evolution, globalization, and extinction destabilised scale's value as a measure of reality. Here, Aaron Rosenberg examines how four novelists moved radically beyond novelistic realism, repurposing the genres-romance, melodrama, gothic, and epic-it had ostensibly superseded. He demonstrates how H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf engaged with climatic and ecological crises that persist today, requiring us to navigate multiple temporal and spatial scales simultaneously. The volume shows that problems of scale constrain our responses to crisis by shaping the linguistic, aesthetic, and narrative structures through which we imagine it. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

The Art of the Reprint

The Art of the Reprint PDF Author: Rosalind Parry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009272012
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
The Art of the Reprint is a vivid and engaging history of the nineteenth-century novel as it was re-imagined for everyday readers by four extraordinary twentieth-century illustrators. It focuses especially on four reprints: a 1929 edition of Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native (1878) with engravings by Clare Leighton, a 1930 edition of Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851) with images by Rockwell Kent, a 1943 edition of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) with woodblocks by Fritz Eichenberg, and a complete set of Jane Austen's novels (1786-1817) illustrated from 1957 to 1974 by Joan Hassall. Taken together, these reprints are indicative of a legacy crafted from historical distance, through personal, political, and artistic circumstance, and for a new century. With biographical, archival, and art- and literary-historical sources as well as close readings of images and texts, this is a richly illustrated account of how artists reinvent canons for the general reader.