Abstract
This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.
This review examines Wilt L. Idema’s A Historical Taxonomy of Talking Birds in Chinese Literature (2025), highlighting its extensive documentation of parrots and other talking birds across two millennia of Chinese texts. While primarily descriptive and philological, the work offers valuable material for animal studies by revealing how literary representations privilege human meanings over animal experience.
Keywords: Chinese literature, Talking birds, Animal studies, Parrots