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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... aristocratic rejection of ratio- nalism and an attempt to appropriate the birth - space of nature as part of its legitimating self - identity : their cultural power lay , not in merit ( reason ) , but in blood lines ( nature ) . The ...
... aristocratic virtue ) overcomes textuality ( con- strued as clerkly misogyny ) ; virtuous faith overcomes materialist reason . Resting on birth in place of merit , aristocratic power could not be legitimated through the exercise of ...
... aristocratic appropriation and redefinition of the erotic nightingale of oral tradition , the issue of women's chastity is not only central to the poem but reflects back on the larger significance of the female nightingale as an ...