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

Mocking Bird Technologies brings together a range of perspectives to offer an extended meditation on bird mimicry in literature: the way birds mimic humans, the way humans mimic birds, and the way mimicry of any kind involves technologies 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 (18th-century studies, romantic studies, early American studies, 20th-century studies, and postcolonial studies), the collection offers new models for combining comparative and global studies of literature and culture.

Christopher GoGwilt (Edited By)
Christopher GoGwilt is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Fordham University.

Melanie D. Holm (Edited By)
Melanie Holm is an Assistant Professor of English at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania.