Interpreting Nightingales: Gender, Class and HistoriesA&C Black, 1997 M07 1 - 299 pages The poetic nightingale is so familiar it seems hardly to merit serious attention. Yet its ubiquity is significant, suggesting associations with erotic love, pathos and art that cross culture and history. This book examines the different nightingales of European literature, starting with the Greek myth of Philomela, the raped girl, silenced by having her tongue cut out, and then transformed into the bird whose name means poet, poetry and nightingale simultaneously. Moving from the classical to the Christian worlds, Jeni Williams discusses nightingales and nature in the early church and sees the emergence of the figure as an emotive emblem of the aristocracy in mediaeval vernacular debate poetry. Her final chapters use the nightingale and the myth to examine Elizabeth Barrett Browning's struggle for an active female voice in Victorian poetry. |
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Page 18
... ambiguity , Sophocles is less interested in containment and , in fact , multiplies the story's ambiguities by expanding it to tragedy . Precisely because of its metaphoric ambiguity , the. 18 Interpreting Nightingales.
... ambiguity , Sophocles is less interested in containment and , in fact , multiplies the story's ambiguities by expanding it to tragedy . Precisely because of its metaphoric ambiguity , the. 18 Interpreting Nightingales.
Page 19
... ambiguity provides the ground for immensely varied interpretations of its narrative : a narrative which operates on many levels as a study of complex power rela- tions out of which the related issues of aesthetics and gender emerge ...
... ambiguity provides the ground for immensely varied interpretations of its narrative : a narrative which operates on many levels as a study of complex power rela- tions out of which the related issues of aesthetics and gender emerge ...
Page 21
... ambiguity of an art which is gendered and thus caught up itself in the power structures of its society14 and leads to a silencing of Joplin's own : that of the nightingale , of art . By trans- lating the vindictive oppositional frame ...
... ambiguity of an art which is gendered and thus caught up itself in the power structures of its society14 and leads to a silencing of Joplin's own : that of the nightingale , of art . By trans- lating the vindictive oppositional frame ...
Page 24
... ambiguity that lies at the heart of the Philomela myth is evoked in Lysistrata's manipulation of an ' oracle ' drawing on the husband and wife relationship of hoopoe and swallow , and the transgression of gender roles caught up in the ...
... ambiguity that lies at the heart of the Philomela myth is evoked in Lysistrata's manipulation of an ' oracle ' drawing on the husband and wife relationship of hoopoe and swallow , and the transgression of gender roles caught up in the ...
Page 25
... Ambiguity and Violence : The Notes of the Drama To an unstable Athens the nightingale's mythic background had a tremendous suggestive power . It emerges with particular force in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus which shares the myth's concern ...
... Ambiguity and Violence : The Notes of the Drama To an unstable Athens the nightingale's mythic background had a tremendous suggestive power . It emerges with particular force in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus which shares the myth's concern ...
Contents
| 7 | |
| 9 | |
| 16 | |
| 34 | |
Medieval English Nightingales | 75 |
Victorian Nightingales | 142 |
Barrett Browning among the Nightingales | 169 |
Nightingales in Classical Literature | 226 |
Christian Latin Poems | 236 |
Notes | 247 |
Bibliography | 284 |
Index of Names and Titles | 294 |
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Common terms and phrases
aesthetic Alcuin ambiguity appears argument aristocratic Aristophanes associated attempts Aurora Leigh Barrett Browning Barrett Browning's Bianca bird boundaries C.S. Lewis Caterina century chapter Chaucer chivalric Christian classical conflict courtly critics Cuckoo cultural daisy debate defined denies desire discussion disruption Elizabeth Barrett Browning emblematic English erotic expressed female feminine figure Floure Flower Fulbert of Chartres gender genre Greek harmony hoopoe human identity ideology individual ingale Knight's Tale Lady language Latin Leaf Leaf company literature Lost Bower lover lyric male masculine medieval medieval literature Mermin narrator natural world night nightin nightingale Ovid passion past patterns Patterson Paulus Albarus Pecham's Philomela myth poem poet poetic voice points political Procne reader references relation religious repression role secular sexual significance silence social song Sophocles space speak stanza structure symbolic Tereus textual Thrush tion trans University Press verse victim Victorian poetry woman women writing