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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... Leaf not only implies an allegorical debate but also refers to a courtly May game - further serve to illustrate this complexity , for in both cases the implied identity conferred by a title , even one retrospectively imposed , appears ...
... Leaf , while femininity is defined by gentleness and harmony . The text's ' feminine ' qualities thus turn it — despite its attempts to align itself with a class ideology stabilized through its appropriation and repression of the ...
... Leaf was such that it furnished subjects for the Chaucer window in Westminster Abbey : the concrete expression of the ruling classes ' transformation of great writers into national heritage . Yet within two years it was expelled from ...