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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... disruption - not just among an aristocracy threatened by social mobility and at- tempting to tighten control of inheritance laws . She points to widespread anxieties , economic depression , social discontent and rebellion.46 In this ...
... disruption and reconstitution of a threatened aris- tocratic order onto the issue of women's chastity ( and hence of the nature of their desire ) , because this text considers disruption within the narrator himself , the debate focuses ...
... disruption of the ideal is made even clearer in the ' Conclusion ' where the interplay between poetry and the enclosed space , between Bertram and Geraldine , comes to the fore . The poem shifts its focus by moving into the enclosed ...