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. |
From inside the book
Results 1-3 of 35
... genre which they were struggling to appropriate . My reading sug- gests ways of relating changes within the literary form to those issues of class ( courtier , aristocrat and writer ) I see dramatized in the late fourteenth - century ...
... genre is being twisted ; the fact that it is no longer a debate between two birds in the lyric space of the nightingale points to disruption in itself , while the introduction of a human figure disturbs the abstract quality of the ...
... genre to investigate those aspects it seems designed to repress . And in all the cases so far what is consistently excluded from the abstract debate poem is the individual desire of the self which would disrupt the ideological conflict ...