Avian Figures of Speech in James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer

Essays in Criticism, 2021

SO, NOBLEMEN AND NOBLEWOMEN HAVE DINED on strange stews and exotic fowl, including swan and young heron, when after the third course the doors of the hall open, and in rides a mysterious knight on an extraordinary horse. It could be the inciting incident in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or the event by which escapade and adventure are triggered in several Arthurian narratives. Except the steed this knight is mounted on is made of brass, and the king is not Arthur but Cambyuskan, aka Genghis Khan-not to be confused with Combusken, the bipedal chicken-like Pokémon character with powerful thighs, who can deliver as many as ten kicks per second. As well as bestowing the gift of the alloy horse, the knight presents a sword with magical healing properties, a mirror that warns against adversity, and a ring, which is given to the king's daughter, Canacee: that if hire lust it for to were Upon hir thombe or in hir purse it bere, Ther is no fowel that fleeth under the hevene That she ne shal wel understonde his stevene. 1

Disputation Literature in the Near East and Beyond. Edited by Enrique Jiménez and Catherine Mittermayer. Berlin etc.: de Gruyter, 351-366., 2020

Said tea to coffee: "Oh youb urnt one, All blackened and crushed, your good looks gone, (…) Howc omey ou're so proud and so haughty? Loquacity'st rulyy our forte! Yellow one, shall Il ist your disasters, One by one to your Bedouin masters? Youd ullard! Your real name is coffee, To all whoi mbibe, catastrophe! Af ruit youa re not,n or as avour, Nor relieff or the tired from their labour. But me, Ig ivea ll relaxation, I'mabalm, soothingw ounds and vexation."

2019

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the role of the narrator in the Middle English bird debate poems. Seven poems, both major and minor, are considered, most notably Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls. Clanvowe's "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale," the anonymous The Owl and the Nightingale, and "A Parliament of Birds." I also briefly consider, in addition to the seven Middle English works, two French poems in the bird debate genre, relating them to Chaucer's poem, which they possibly influenced. Through a close study of poetic form and comparison of the poems with each other and other works of literature I examined the narrator's introductory and concluding comments and all points between. I was able to draw certain conclusions about how these narrational comments help the reader in interpreting the outcome of the bird debates as well as how they enhance the general tone and aesthetic qualities of the poem. The narrator, usually an emotionally belea...

Exemplaria, 2017

Despite the conservative programs of John Lydgate's and Robert Henryson's fifteenth-century retellings of the "cock and jewel" fable, these texts find ways to provoke both their own audiences and us as modern readers. This essay will demonstrate that the fable's provocations reveal themselves in the quotidian vocality of the medieval chicken yard. The soundscape of this space attunes the poetic audience to variations in the pace of rime royal, and this complex pacing draws out new meanings of the fabular moral. When read in terms of poultry sound, both Henryson and Lydgate's verses provoke readers to negotiate nuances of relation between individual experience and generalities of convention in formulating an understanding of value. The Middle Ages frequently retell Latin versions of the Aesopian "cock and jewel" fable, in which a rooster scratches up a gem while foraging and proceeds to address it with a meditation upon its lack of value to him. From Marie de France's twelfth-century Anglo-Norman adaptation to the fifteenth-century English fables of John Lydgate and Robert Henryson, we encounter diversely modified versions of this familiar scene of barnyard poetry and philosophy. The fifteenth-century fables in particular present themselves as a predominantly conservative endeavor, not only in their reactionary dependence upon a rime royal form developed in a previous century but also in the fact that their approach to their source seems considerably less adventurous than that of Chaucer. Unlike Chaucer, who, as Edward Wheatley points out, creatively inverts the fable's components by offering "a cock telling a fable of humans searching through a dung-heap, " Lydgate and Henryson cleave to their source with less imagination (2000, 109-10). 1 At the same time, and in some ways from within this very conservatism, these fables equally demonstrate the ability to provoke. In making this case about fifteenth-century literature, I consider two loci of provocation. The first, as Andrea Denny-Brown notes in her introduction to this special issue (268), involves this literature's incitement of its medieval audience to react to novelty and thus to alter their readerly encounters and interpretations. The second pertains to fifteenth-century literature's potential to provoke modern readers to recognize the need for new methods with which to approach it. This essay will demonstrate

Danilo Verde and Ante Labahan (eds.) Networks of Metaphors in the Hebrew Bible BETL 309, Leuven-Paris-Bristol: Peeters, 2020

Various phenomena that are drawn from the avian world reflect daily experience and familiarity with their lives and habits. The first bird related metaphor exemplifies the semantic field of hunting and trapping birds which inspired the figurative and paradigmatic expression of the innocent entrapped by the evildoer. The second metaphor encompasses a long psychological process of conceptualization, from the petitioner’s trauma of uprootedness and wandering to the intimate experience of safety provided to those who dwell in the house of God.

2019

2009

The paper explores the role of bird characters in African story and myth. Birds are ecological beacons in the environment. Their sight impresses humankind visually and their music is aesthetically important. Birds signal the coming of mornings and the setting of the sun. The aim is to show that African societies attach different beliefs to different birds. Some birds are viewed as signs of bad omen yet others as the reverse. For instance, the vulture is regarded as a sign of death whereas the dove is seen as a bird of grace or good fortune. In addition, some African societies believe that certain birds possess significance for specific occasions or ceremonies like circumcision. The argument shows that such beliefs are mirrored in African story and myth. Traditional African narratives include many bird characters, demonstrating the widespread idea that birds are closely related to humans. Since birds are generally appreciated as guardians of human life, they play a positive role in A...

M. Y TITLE'S DISMISSIVE CLICHE, "that's for the birds," reflects the low status that creatures other than human have held in literary and wider cultural studies. At the same time, my title claims a contribution on this low-status question, which I think gets set aside because it's so complex, rather than so unimportant. Animals (conventional shorthand for animals other than human) have myriad, sometimes contradictory uses in medieval as in modern culture. A swan can be a dish at dinner, or an ancestor represented in a crest and seal, or a sign of good luck for sailors. 1 In The Squire's Tale, Chaucer draws on the genre of romance as a way into thinking about the cultural place of falcons. He presents the peregrine falcon of this tale as richly symbolic, but also as a living bird, raising the issue of species difference and the question of how to respond to this difference-what Chaucer would call difference of "kynde."

2009

Coming out of the University of Zululand's 2008 Literature & Ecology Colloquium at Twinstreams Environmental Education Centre, this special issue of Alternation is devoted to articles about birds, in and out of literature. The birds under discussion range from the symbolic to the literal, the mythological to the real, and the local to the cosmopolitan. The twelve articles, book review, and two review articles contribute in multiple and compelling ways to ecological literary criticism (ecocriticism) in South Africa and beyond, while the section titled 'Recently Reviewed South African Life Writing Publications VI' continues a regular feature in Alternation.