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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... critics . The conflicting subtexts ' of ' Bianca among the Nightingales ' illustrate many of the perspectives available to Victorian scholars . Critics like Shires and Armstrong , for example , may choose to emphasize fragmentation and ...
... critics , the masculine accomplishment signified by learning classical languages . She relates it to Walter Ong's description of the implications of learn- ing Latin for boys in the Renaissance : ' [ It was ] a puberty rite designed not ...
... critics of the early modern court : see , for example , Louis Montrose , “ Eliza , Queene of Shepheardes ” and the Pastoral of Power ' , English Literary Renaissance , 10 ( 1980 ) , pp . 153-82 ; Arthur F. Marotti , " " Love Is not Love ...