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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... conflict , for the representative figures of the competing orders ( warrior versus lover ) are defined in relation to its institu- tional boundaries and the elements ( nature and the feminine ; the nightingale and the woman ) which they ...
... conflict within which she is found is therefore a significant guide to wider issues of definition . Though the nightingale is not a victim in The Owl and the Nightingale and not subject to a violent male attack , she is defined by the ...
... conflict in The Floure and the Leaf , while femininity is defined by gentleness and harmony . The text's ' feminine ' qualities thus turn it — despite its attempts to align itself with a class ideology stabilized through its ...