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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... Tereus , king of Thrace ( and one of the sons of Ares ) , Pandion , king of Athens , rewards his ally by giving him his eldest daughter , Procne , in marriage . After several years and the birth of a son , Itys , Procne yearns to see ...
... Tereus's own self as the women he has betrayed unite to destroy the child , Itys , and , in an inverted ' family ' meal , feed him to his father.10 Seen from this perspective the myth acts as a warning . It polices the ordering of ...
... Tereus , does not appear . Shippey uncon- sciously elides this issue when he places Philomela and Tereus in the company of Lancelot and Guinevere , and Tristan and Isolde , and comments in a matter - of - fact way that the resistance of ...