Interpreting Nightingales: Gender, Class and HistoriesBloomsbury Academic, 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 1-3 of 5
... C.S. Lewis provides a pertinent exam- ple of such analysis , assessing The Cuckoo and the Nightingale as ' a bird - debate of the familiar kind , written in an unusual rhyme scheme , and pleasantly full of country sights and sounds'.54 ...
... C.S. Lewis genially pats an empty - headed ' authoress ' on the head : If she cannot claim wisdom , she has a great deal of good sense and good humour , and is guided by them to write a poem more original than she herself , perhaps ...
... C.S. Lewis , The Allegory of Love ( Oxford : Clarendon Press , 1936 ) , p . 248 . 18. Patterson considers that the aristocracy found it difficult to discrimi- nate between its own class values and those of religion : ' ... chivalric ...