Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 3 Ortolans, Partridges, and Pullets: Birds as Prey in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones

Chapter 4 ‘In Clouds Unnumber’d’: Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ‘Birds and Insects’, Speculative Ecology, and the Politics of Naturalism

Chapter 5 Charlotte Smith and the Nightingale

Chapter 6 The Labouring-Class Bird

Chapter 7 The Language of Birds and the Language of Real Men: Wordsworth, Coleridge and the ‘Best Part’ of Language

Chapter 8 ‘No Parrot, Either in Morality or Sentiment’: Talking Birds and Mechanical Copying in the Age of Sensibility

Chapter 9 Placing Birds in Place: Reading Habitat in Beilby’s and Bewick’s History of British Birds

Chapter 10 The Literary Gilbert White

Chapter 11 When Poet Meets Penguin: British Verse Confronts Exotic Avifauna

Chapter 12 Bird Metaphors in Racialised Ethnographic Description, c. 1700–1800

Chapter 13 ‘The Incomparable Curiosity of Every Feather!’: Cotton Mather’s Birds

Chapter 14 The Passenger Pigeon and the New World Myth of Plenitude