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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... debate was conducted in an abstract space outside the human sphere : the reader of the debate poem was similarly dissociated from the issues at hand and learnt to assess them as arguments . The academic debate thus channels its readers ...
... debate is a querelle a debate specifically about whether women are disruptive of male identity , or whether they nurture and sustain it ( hence the emblematic significance of chastity ) ; 16 in the second , the debate concerns the ...
... debate . Whereas the debate in The Owl and the Nightingale follows the rational procedure of the ecclesiastical courts , with female birds that have natural features as well as functioning as abstract figures , in the later poem the debate ...