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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... attempts to support , and is more concerned with the depiction of harmonious gesture and image — the role allocated to the femi- nine - than with contrasting discourse . Because of this the text risks dissolution ( to rephrase de Man ) ...
... attempts to align itself with a class ideology stabilized through its appropriation and repression of the feminine ... attempt to forge a national identity which accommodated the new voters . He sees this new interest in the ...
... attempts to espouse . The foregrounding of ambi- guity thus becomes a form of opposition even though the ambigu- ous aesthetic text attempts to avoid the political altogether . The ' narcissism ' of Shelley's texts - poems such as ...