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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... identity which occur within a specialized discourse such as poetry . Poetry foregrounds the various relations of the ' feminine ' to a changing ' masculine ' ; of the ' natural ' to what is seen as ' human ' ; of the ambiguous literary ...
... identity , the place of transformation is literalized , no longer that of poetry , of the imag- ination reflecting back on the previous existence , but separated and named as the place of the blissful afterlife . This literalization and ...
... identity ; part of its identity lies in its relation with its feminine other , part in its relationship with other orders . In this case the feminine is hidden within the class relationship between ' gentil ' and ' churl ' , trans ...