My most recent book is City of Ravens: London, its Tower and its Famous Ravens (2011), and Imaginary Animals: The Monstrous, the Wondrous and the Human (2013). This was followed by many further publications including an examination of the darker side of animal studies, Animals in the Third Reich (2000), and a sort of compendium, The Mythical Zoo (2002), and a cultural history of corvids entitled Crow (2003). We put together a few conferences, which generated a lot of excitement among the few who attended, but little notice in academia or in what they sometimes call "the real world."įrom fables and anecdotes, I moved to mythology, and published The Serpent and the Swan (1997), a study of animal bride tales from around the world. It was initially a rag-tag band of intellectual adventurers who loved literature but could not find a niche in the scholarly world. Around 1995, I founded Nature in Legend and Story (NILAS, Inc.), an organization that combines storytelling and scholarship.
But soon I managed to publish two books on animals in literature, The Frog King (1990) and The Parliament of Animals (1992). Today, I shudder at how nervy the switch was for a destitute young scholar, who, despite one book and several articles, had not managed to obtain any steady job except mopping floors. Within a few months, I had junked my previous research and devoted my studies to these texts.
There, without any self-consciousness, was a new world of romance and adventure, filled with turkeys that spoke Arabic, beavers that build like architects, and dogs that solve murders. By accident, I came across an encyclopedia of animals that had been written in the early nineteenth century. I was feeling frustrated in my search for an academic job and even the study of literature. I first became interested in the literature of animals around the end of the 1980s, not terribly long after I had obtained my Ph.D.
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