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 Here

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 Language

Birdsong, Speech, and Language PDF Author: Johan J. Bolhuis
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262018608
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 557

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Book Description
Scholars have long been captivated by the parallels between birdsong and human speech and language. In this book, leading scholars draw on the latest research to explore what birdsong can tell us about the biology of human speech and language and the consequences for evolutionary biology. They examine the cognitive and neural similarities between birdsong learning and speech and language acquisition, considering vocal imitation, auditory learning, an early vocalization phase ("babbling"), the structural properties of birdsong and human language, and the striking similarities between the neural organization of learning and vocal production in birdsong and human speech. After outlining the basic issues involved in the study of both language and evolution, the contributors compare birdsong and language in terms of acquisition, recursion, and core structural properties, and then examine the neurobiology of song and speech, genomic factors, and the emergence and evolution of language.

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.

Birdsongs

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

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Book Description
Young readers can celebrate the birds in their own neighborhoods with this lyrical picture book that helps them learn to count backwards from ten to one. Full color.

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.

Birdsong

Birdsong PDF Author: Sebastian Faulks
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307820386
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 498

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Book Description
#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A mesmerising story of love and war spanning three generations and the unimaginable gulf between the First World War and the 1990s In this "overpowering and beautiful novel" (The New Yorker), the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford passes through a tempestuous love affair with Isabelle Azaire in France and enters the dark, surreal world beneath the trenches of No Man's Land. Sebastian Faulks creates a world of fiction that is as tragic as A Farewell to Arms and as sensuous as The English Patient, crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love.

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.

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.

Poetry and Listening

Poetry and Listening PDF Author: Zoë Skoulding
Publisher:
ISBN: 1789621798
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
At the intersection between sound studies and new lyric criticism, this book explores the social, political and ecological dimensions of contemporary poetry's acoustic contexts. It discovers how poetry in the UK and USA has been re-energised by the influence of recorded sound and the creative methods that emerged with it.

Scale, Crisis, and the Modern Novel

Scale, Crisis, and the Modern Novel PDF Author: Aaron Rosenberg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009271776
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
An examination of how four industrial-age novelists confronted crises at new and unprecedented temporal, ecological and geographical scales.