Interpreting Nightingales: Gender, Class and HistoriesBloomsbury Academic, 1997 - 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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... Bianca among the Nightingales ' these elements come together in the confrontation of the female speaker with the ' feminine ' nightingales , of the voice of eventful moment with that of familiar repetition , of motion with stasis , and ...
... Bianca's sexuality is certainly central , she is consumed with jeal- ousy , frustration and pain , a mental torture driving her from her warm and harmonious Italian home to a cold , dead England that closely resembles the Catholic state ...
... Bianca's rage is a sense of impotence and jealousy that Giulio should prefer the golden image - ' her white and pink ... her grace of limb ' - to her own passionate reality . The violence of the ' gentler ' ways that Bianca says the ...