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
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Page 9
... figure , a solitary female voice singing unseen , bodiless , her rhapsodic melody swelling through the silence of spring nights , associated with beautiful , melancholy subjective verse . This is the nightingale of the enlightenment ...
... figure , a solitary female voice singing unseen , bodiless , her rhapsodic melody swelling through the silence of spring nights , associated with beautiful , melancholy subjective verse . This is the nightingale of the enlightenment ...
Page 10
... figure its enablement . The poem is a tour de force of past images and literatures . These nightingales are not merely repetitions of past figures — the classical Philomela or the Romantic bird — but form a kaleidoscope of conflicting ...
... figure its enablement . The poem is a tour de force of past images and literatures . These nightingales are not merely repetitions of past figures — the classical Philomela or the Romantic bird — but form a kaleidoscope of conflicting ...
Page 11
... figure thus implies that it carries qualities that mark it out as ' 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 ...
... figure thus implies that it carries qualities that mark it out as ' 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 ...
Page 12
... figure of communication it- self , allows for the perpetual remembrance of her violation . For Hesiod the tale of ... figure of the aesthetic . Hatto attempts to qualify the difference between the masculine and feminine forms that ...
... figure of communication it- self , allows for the perpetual remembrance of her violation . For Hesiod the tale of ... figure of the aesthetic . Hatto attempts to qualify the difference between the masculine and feminine forms that ...
Page 13
... figure which serves only to reflect the human , its gender is defined through its relation with other terms rather than in any static essential qual- ity . Both in its feminine and its masculine forms , the nightingale's specific ...
... figure which serves only to reflect the human , its gender is defined through its relation with other terms rather than in any static essential qual- ity . Both in its feminine and its masculine forms , the nightingale's specific ...
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