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. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 27
Page 9
... voice singing unseen , bodiless , her rhapsodic melody swelling through the silence of spring nights , associated ... poetic ' tropes from the most famous of all nightingale poems , Keats's Ode to a Nightingale , a figure which ...
... voice singing unseen , bodiless , her rhapsodic melody swelling through the silence of spring nights , associated ... poetic ' tropes from the most famous of all nightingale poems , Keats's Ode to a Nightingale , a figure which ...
Page 10
... poetic nightingale : an association particularly pertinent to the difficulties of the female artist . The ... voice is haunted by the voices of the nightingales , and the choral counterpoint they provide to her monologue provides ...
... poetic nightingale : an association particularly pertinent to the difficulties of the female artist . The ... voice is haunted by the voices of the nightingales , and the choral counterpoint they provide to her monologue provides ...
Page 16
... poetry is ... the postprophetic moment , when the theme of loss merges with that of voice — when , in fact , a ' lost voice ' becomes the subject or moving force of poetic song.1 As a tale which speaks of the silencing of the violated ...
... poetry is ... the postprophetic moment , when the theme of loss merges with that of voice — when , in fact , a ' lost voice ' becomes the subject or moving force of poetic song.1 As a tale which speaks of the silencing of the violated ...
Page 27
... poetic voice as well as with poetry itself . If the nightingale's voice speaks to the political world of its viola- tions , the place from which it sings is a place outside these corrup- tions , a place that enables both the recognition ...
... poetic voice as well as with poetry itself . If the nightingale's voice speaks to the political world of its viola- tions , the place from which it sings is a place outside these corrup- tions , a place that enables both the recognition ...
Page 29
... voice of the nightingale as that of poetry , to the place from which the nightingale sings . It is as if , like ... poetic burden of a raped innocence . This time , however , the violation , the silencing , is made present not by ...
... voice of the nightingale as that of poetry , to the place from which the nightingale sings . It is as if , like ... poetic burden of a raped innocence . This time , however , the violation , the silencing , is made present not by ...
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