A Year of Real and Literary Birds is simultaneously an almanac of bird life, a work of interdisciplinary literary scholarship, and a chronicle of family life. The book paints an intimate portrait of a place and a diverse cast of authors by bringing to life the birds within landscapes both literary and actual. Intertwined within each chapter are animal narratives from a diverse sampling of writers, including, among others, Homer, the Brothers Grimm, Sarah Orne Jewett, William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Emily Brontë, Thomas Pynchon, Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Mary Oliver, Bronislaw Maj, Mourning Dove, and (repeatedly, given Godfrey’s background as a Hemingway scholar) Ernest Hemingway. Using a blend of ecocriticism, animal studies, close reading, and the techniques of creative nonfiction, Godfrey unpacks the ways that authors and ornithologists spanning the centuries have tried to bridge the gap between human and nonhuman worlds.
