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 24
... religious cults and the restive women who practise them threaten from within . Aristophanes depicts a world in which the destructivity of war ( Ares ) is set against the fertility and voluptuous sexuality of the women , and the men are ...
... religious cults and the restive women who practise them threaten from within . Aristophanes depicts a world in which the destructivity of war ( Ares ) is set against the fertility and voluptuous sexuality of the women , and the men are ...
Page 36
... religious and secular arenas ( the subject of this chapter ) and the increasing interest in Aristotelian rationalism among the clerical classes ( the starting point of the next chapter ) is reminiscent of developments seen in the ...
... religious and secular arenas ( the subject of this chapter ) and the increasing interest in Aristotelian rationalism among the clerical classes ( the starting point of the next chapter ) is reminiscent of developments seen in the ...
Page 37
... religious poetry after the thirteenth century with reference to Pecham's Philomena . I conclude with a footnote on the fifteenth - century rewritings of Pecham once attributed to Lydgate . ( Because these texts may be inaccessible , the ...
... religious poetry after the thirteenth century with reference to Pecham's Philomena . I conclude with a footnote on the fifteenth - century rewritings of Pecham once attributed to Lydgate . ( Because these texts may be inaccessible , the ...
Page 43
... religious communion by nour- ishing the Christian soul , teaching all to praise , all to sing . If Paulinus's poem equates the realm of art with that of the divine— and sets this arena apart from that of the human , sundered from it ...
... religious communion by nour- ishing the Christian soul , teaching all to praise , all to sing . If Paulinus's poem equates the realm of art with that of the divine— and sets this arena apart from that of the human , sundered from it ...
Page 47
... religious literature , the first beast epic to be re- corded33 being the anonymous tenth - century Ecbasis captivi ( see p . 238 ) . For the purposes of this study this is a significant text because , in a tale within the tale , the ...
... religious literature , the first beast epic to be re- corded33 being the anonymous tenth - century Ecbasis captivi ( see p . 238 ) . For the purposes of this study this is a significant text because , in a tale within the tale , the ...
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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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