The avian as Native and natured Other: Re-imagining the bird, from British Romanticism to contemporary Native American literature

This study examines the avian images and tropes in British Romantic and Native American literatures, especially how well such literary usages of the bird succeed from an ecological and/or animals-rights point of view. Central to my argument is how avians and human Natives have been othered, in Anglo literature, in quite parallel ways, for similar reasons. The introductory chapter establishes this close connection between bird and “Indian”, surveys recent critical theories seminal to my study—ecocriticism and poststructuralism—and distinguishes my own plot of ground that must diverge from both in significant ways. Most crucially, the dominant subject of ecocriticism to date—the land itself—has rendered its own scholarly “environment” relatively devoid of the very fauna that so manifestly inhabit the ecosystem. At last, I would posit a distinct school of literary and cultural criticism—zoöcriticism—to better consider the avian Others that are my gist, journeying towards a more viable interspecies relationship between human and “animal”—towards a Weltanschauung that is more truly non-speciesist and posthuman.; The middle three chapters explore the relationship between bird and human in British Romanticism, from Cowper to Clare, reading various prototypical “bird” poems of that period as ultimately acts of ego recuperation, impositions of the anthropocentric “Same” upon the avian Other. And yet these poets, particularly Wordsworth and Clare, come closer to a viable interconnectedness to the avian Other than any other Western writers of the last millennium. But this body of writing must finally be deemed a grand failure and lost opportunity, as the bird, in the hands of the late Romantics, becomes more and more an intrapsychic symbol etherealized beyond all nature.; So I turn in the final chapter to an exploration of not only the bird “as native” but the bird by the “Native”, considering how both traditional and contemporary Native American literary representations of the avian differ from the British Romantic portrayals previously examined. I conclude that this alternative New-World post-Romanticism, culminating in the Native ecofeminism of Hogan and Harjo, offers the best vision through which to fulfill the original Romantics' promise.