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. |
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... Flower . Decay thus indicates a loss of solidity , no longer full and firm but limp and flaccid . The image unavoidably summons up the failure of the Flower knights to be ' proper ' men , and the dis- astrous implications of a society ...
... Flower company illustrates that any deviation leads to fragmentation and collapse . Not only do the knights of the Flower as a group lack servants , their individual lack of mastery is indicated by the fact that they walk hand in hand ...
... flower and the leaf ( see the introduction to Charles of Orleans : The English Poems ( ed . Robert Steele ; Early English Text Society , 1941 ) , but biblical exegesis indicates the significance of the symbols of the leaf and flower . I ...