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. |
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... emblematic , the text's unspoken desire ( for the fact of the text registers a re- pressed desire ) is expressed through spatial and visual imagery . Yet unfocused images can be read in contrasting ways : for the narrator ( as a ...
... emblematic image . When Lewis says that ' the Virtues ask the Vices to a picnic ' , he implies that there is no com- mon ground between them , no possibility of change . But this is not , as Lewis himself remarks , a ' black and white ...
... emblematic battle games of the tournaments.117 Yet the very concentration on the aesthetics of the nobility shows the shadow of degeneration that haunts chivalry from within - without violence none of the games have significance . The ...