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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... individual to the fixed pattern of creation , towards the Gothic pathos of the iso- lated individual has been interpreted as in part due to the aspirations and mobility of this merchant class . The Twelfth Century and after The Re ...
... individual voice , at once at the heart of the debate within the dream within the poem , and emanating from wholly outside its aesthetic frame ( s ) by referring to songs written by Clanvowe himself ( 1. 250 ; possibly 1. 289 ) ...
... individual voice that is caught within the Philomela myth . Both of these elements seem important to Barrett Browning though both of them are modified in her practice . I want to argue , for instance , that the development of the female ...