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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... associated through shorthand with masculine virility . The feminine ivy is associated with the colour black and with the appetite of a single and predatory night bird , the owl ; while the masculine holly is presented during the day ...
... associated with poetry and passion , an association which became far more evident as the nineteenth century progressed . The nightingale song that accompanies Rochester's first proposal to Jane in Brontë's Jane Eyre is not only ...
... associated with women and art . The rich imagery of breasts and milk so celebrated in recent criticism should not obscure the ' great image of the bird , the spread wings and open beak , [ which reaches ] from end to end of the nine ...