One: I begin with an account of Stephen Gregory’s prizewinning horror novel The Cormorant, which synthesises much of the history of representing the cormorant as evil. I then trace this tradition across time, looking closely at the origins of the Satanic cormorant in medieval and early modern European theology, art and literature, notably in paintings by Bellini, Mantegna and Carpaccio, and I address Milton’s choice in Paradise Lost to bring Satan into Eden in the form of a cormorant. I describe the long-term impact of Milton’s Satanic cormorant in literary prose from Jane Eyre to Dracula and in scientific writing from Willughby to Bewick, and finally I provide a reading of a poem by Denise Levertov in which the cormorant is characterised as an avian Nazi. In the process, I reflect on the nature of metaphor and the apparent inevitability of anthropocentrism in writing about nonhuman animals.

This chapter attempts to account for the critical aesthetico-political shift that occurred in Jean Genet's theatre from The Balcony onwards. The Balcony explores the difficulty of revolutionary action in a capitalist economy manipulated by a spectacular notion of community. Special attention is given to a painful existential event that Genet recounts undergoing in the early 1950s, and which he was later to describe in several important essays on Rembrandt and Giacometti as 'la blessure', or wound. The chapter argues that Genet's late theatre, unlike his novels and early dramas which practise a largely individualistic politics of resistance, look to build what the queer and gender theorist Judith Butler has called different 'coalitional alliances' between oppressed subjects. Genet's early experiments in theatre, cinema and dance share many of the same political and aesthetic concerns as his queer novels.

This chapter looks at how Jean Genet's 1958 play The Blacks opened the hidden wounds of the period, namely those related to insecurities about France's 'racial identity' on the eve of decolonisation. In The Blacks, the object of détournement is limited, since it is focused on reversing the tropes and clichés of 'black theatre', which were rooted, at the time, in popular entertainment forms such as clown shows, music-hall routines and circus acts. The post-Lacanian psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva's words highlight the extent to which objects of filth in abjection are metaphorical. Like The Mousetrap in Hamlet, the play-within-the play of The Blacks is designed to make the French spectators feel guilty, to remind them of their whiteness. The new configurations of identity are dependent upon the disclosure of a wrong that invited French subjects to disidentify with the French nation-State and to hear the call of the immigrant Other.

This chapter explores The Screens, Jean Genet's last play, as a historical event. It clarifies the relationship between aesthetic and political events by showing how the 'battle of The Screens' was caused by Genet's 'oblique attempt to provoke a politics' by 'illuminating the void'. The main thrust of Genet's attack in The Screens was directed against the colons and the Army, both of whom, are represented as grotesque tyrants, devoid of sympathy and intelligence. The difficult situation facing the French government was exacerbated by the attitude of the French Army who had been humbled at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. In common with the pieds noirs who regarded Algeria as a part of France and themselves as proper French citizens, the Army was determined to keep Algérie française at all costs, and saw the conflict as a chance for winning military pride.

This chapter focuses on the works of Maura Laverty and Patrick Kavanagh. It first analyses Kavanagh' two versions of the Bildungsroman: his autobiography The Green Fool (1938) and his novel Tarry Flynn (1948). It then compares his works with Maura Laverty, whose works depict sexuality, rural life and Irish underdevelopment. The chapter argues that Laverty's and Kavanagh's youth narratives and their visions of rural Ireland were important innovations in the history of the Irish Bildungsroman.

Two: I assess the parallel history of the saintlike pelican – Christ to the cormorant’s Satan – describing the close interweaving of the symbolic histories of these two birds over time. In the process, I address the tradition of the ‘vulning’ pelican, focusing on the destructive pairing of cormorant and pelican in Richard II and then turning to The Merchant of Venice, in which the mutual loathing of Shylock and Antonio is expressed through their respective implied identities as cormorant and pelican, and I discuss the historic antisemitic association of cormorants. I then reflect on the crucified cormorant in modern writing and culture, briefly discussing also the redemption of the cormorant in contemporary British young adult fiction. I conclude with an account of a recent poem by African-American poet Tiana Clark in which, reversing centuries of racist association with the bird, she finds her own post-Christian identity in the cormorant.

I conclude by briefly addressing the relations of science and culture and the persistence of symbolism in contemporary scientific discourse, and I deploy the case study of the cormorant to discuss the value of longue durée cultural history for contemporary scientific analysis of the contextual aspects of human-animal conflicts.