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 13
... writing , producing hymns and lyrics rooted in an individual , not hierarchical , experience of ecstasy ; in the second , the chang- ing status of the nightingale in poetry points to the association of particular tropes , especially ...
... writing , producing hymns and lyrics rooted in an individual , not hierarchical , experience of ecstasy ; in the second , the chang- ing status of the nightingale in poetry points to the association of particular tropes , especially ...
Page 18
... Writing at a time when the social and political structures of his contemporary world were under threat , and the festival of Dionysus provided the cultural frame to contain and explore dangerous ambiguity , Sophocles is less interested ...
... Writing at a time when the social and political structures of his contemporary world were under threat , and the festival of Dionysus provided the cultural frame to contain and explore dangerous ambiguity , Sophocles is less interested ...
Page 29
... writing after him in the same way as those that sing in the woods of Colonus , their association with poetry insistently throws up questions of definition and place , voice and silence . Despite the absence of both personal violation ...
... writing after him in the same way as those that sing in the woods of Colonus , their association with poetry insistently throws up questions of definition and place , voice and silence . Despite the absence of both personal violation ...
Page 35
... writing which continued to associate the bird with both poetry and the ambivalent boundaries of human— here translated to specifically Christian — identity . But this specifi- cation alters the terms of that identity . Halliday and ...
... writing which continued to associate the bird with both poetry and the ambivalent boundaries of human— here translated to specifically Christian — identity . But this specifi- cation alters the terms of that identity . Halliday and ...
Page 36
... writing in a pagan state , but as the situation changes so the relations between church and state shift : culture cannot be isolated and frozen into these pockets . If the concepts of ' nature ' and the ' feminine ' are seen as ...
... writing in a pagan state , but as the situation changes so the relations between church and state shift : culture cannot be isolated and frozen into these pockets . If the concepts of ' nature ' and the ' feminine ' are seen as ...
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