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 9
... feminine , though their inhuman seduction took a more concrete form : those sailors who listened to them steered to their destruction and were cut to pieces on submerged rocks . Listening to the nightingale seems to have very little ...
... feminine , though their inhuman seduction took a more concrete form : those sailors who listened to them steered to their destruction and were cut to pieces on submerged rocks . Listening to the nightingale seems to have very little ...
Page 11
... feminine ' over and above the actual sex of the bird and which therefore highlight the constructed nature of gendered identity itself . But the nightingale is not only a symbol of constructed gender identities of either the perpetual ...
... feminine ' over and above the actual sex of the bird and which therefore highlight the constructed nature of gendered identity itself . But the nightingale is not only a symbol of constructed gender identities of either the perpetual ...
Page 12
... feminine forms that this figure of love takes by relating them to two distinct contexts , deriving ' Romanic , Germanic and Slavon- ic nightingales from oral traditions nourished for many years over a more or less continuous stretch of ...
... feminine forms that this figure of love takes by relating them to two distinct contexts , deriving ' Romanic , Germanic and Slavon- ic nightingales from oral traditions nourished for many years over a more or less continuous stretch of ...
Page 13
... feminine and its masculine forms , the nightingale's specific qualities are controlled and transformed by wider histori- cal forces , and crossovers occur . Two brief examples will serve : in the first , the change in the representation ...
... feminine and its masculine forms , the nightingale's specific qualities are controlled and transformed by wider histori- cal forces , and crossovers occur . Two brief examples will serve : in the first , the change in the representation ...
Page 17
... feminine to the political state . It is interesting that W.R. Halliday should suggest that the Philomela myth is a fairly late development of a more ancient bird fable , one which acquired the form and the names by which we still ...
... feminine to the political state . It is interesting that W.R. Halliday should suggest that the Philomela myth is a fairly late development of a more ancient bird fable , one which acquired the form and the names by which we still ...
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