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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... argument and that ratio- nal argument leads to the achievement of truth . This is most revealing in the vernacular debate : in some ways the classical debate text extends the intellectual bias Dronke detects in the acquisition of a ...
... arguments of the querelle imposes a quite different and more passive role on the reader . I consider this to be ... argument translated into a hierarchy which bene- fits those in power . In this second case the reader is no longer ...
... argument that suggests an exploration of interiors . 21. See Nichols , ' The New Medievalism ' , p . 23 . 22. See William Henry Jackson's discussion of the German tournament . He sees one of its functions to be the provision of an arena ...