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 10
... past and the past versions of the literary nightingale press , overwhelming and almost suffocating her indi- vidual cry even as they figure its enablement . The poem is a tour de force of past images and literatures . These nightingales ...
... past and the past versions of the literary nightingale press , overwhelming and almost suffocating her indi- vidual cry even as they figure its enablement . The poem is a tour de force of past images and literatures . These nightingales ...
Page 25
... past . Its tenets continue to be taken for granted in A.R. Chandler's descriptive survey of the nightingale in Greek and Latin poetry , 35 in which Hesiod's passage is seen only in terms of a personal predicament , without considering ...
... past . Its tenets continue to be taken for granted in A.R. Chandler's descriptive survey of the nightingale in Greek and Latin poetry , 35 in which Hesiod's passage is seen only in terms of a personal predicament , without considering ...
Page 26
... past tragedy— and thus Cassandra , like the nightingale , speaks a truth which is accessible only to the spectator who stands outside the momentary linear unfolding of the plot . Simultaneously the pathos is height- ened by an ...
... past tragedy— and thus Cassandra , like the nightingale , speaks a truth which is accessible only to the spectator who stands outside the momentary linear unfolding of the plot . Simultaneously the pathos is height- ened by an ...
Page 27
... past , with shared themes of incest , mutilation , displacement . Yet when he arrives , Colonus becomes the place of golden flowers and fertility , the place outside the boundaries of the violating world , the place of art and wholeness ...
... past , with shared themes of incest , mutilation , displacement . Yet when he arrives , Colonus becomes the place of golden flowers and fertility , the place outside the boundaries of the violating world , the place of art and wholeness ...
Page 29
... past , but by the reader whose experi- ence supplements the Utopian harmony . The very simplicity and completeness of Utopia , of an idyllic world , 42 throws the ( omitted ) corruptions of the town into relief . Pastoral poetry is a ...
... past , but by the reader whose experi- ence supplements the Utopian harmony . The very simplicity and completeness of Utopia , of an idyllic world , 42 throws the ( omitted ) corruptions of the town into relief . Pastoral poetry is a ...
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