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. |
From inside the book
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... century . Changes and Developments : Christian Latin Nightingales before the Twelfth Century If the nightingale that sings in Paulinus's poem articulates both the problems and the expression of his contemporary Christian- ity , that ...
... century it became increasingly significant for the aristocracy . Warner's fascinating chapter on the troubadours sets the issue of matrilineal succession at the heart of the change from an eleventh - century celebration of sensuality to ...
... century court writing emerged from within the centre of power ; in the nineteenth century literature was institutionalized at the margins . This shift is accompanied by an equivalent shift in the ' site of ideological opposition ...