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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... erotic . The Sensuous Oral Voice Lo rossinhols s'esbaudeya Josta la flor el verjan , E pren m'en tan grans enveya Qu ... erotic pursuits of human lovers.52 During the eleventh century new amalgams started to appear between ...
... erotic nightingale to convey her passionate adoration of Christ , though aspects of the classical bird - its femininity and its association with death - also seem present . The two strands combine to produce the poetry of ecstasy , this ...
... erotic pursuit of its female inhabitant . In this example he suggests that he take on a rural identity ( here ' un gardaire ' / a shepherd ) , a suggestion which involves its own transgression of social definition and categories . She ...