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Mocking Bird Technologies: The Poetics of Parroting, Mimicry, and Other Starling Tropes

Online ISBN:
9780823280520
Print ISBN:
9780823278480
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

Mocking Bird Technologies: The Poetics of Parroting, Mimicry, and Other Starling Tropes

Christopher GoGwilt (ed.)
Christopher GoGwilt
(ed.)
Fordham University
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Published online:
24 May 2018
Published in print:
2 January 2018
Online ISBN:
9780823280520
Print ISBN:
9780823278480
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

Abstract

The volume offers an extended meditation on different senses of bird mimicry in literature: the way birds mimic humans, the way humans mimic birds, and the way mimicry of any kind involves technologies of mimicry that extend across as well as beyond languages and species. The essays examine the historical, poetic, and semiotic problem of mimesis exemplified both by the imitative behavior of parrots, starlings, and other mocking birds, and by the poetic trope of such birds in a range of literary and philological traditions. Drawing from a cross-section of traditional periods and fields in literary studies (eighteenth-century studies, romantic studies, early American studies, twentieth-century studies, and postcolonial studies), the collection offers new models for combining comparative and global studies of literature and culture. The volume presents thirteen ways of looking at mocking bird technologies: nine critical essays, a dialogic meditation, an afterword, and a coda. The look of the academic essay is complemented by the look of accompanying specimens of bird mimicry.

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