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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... lyrics that it generated , expresses a deep emotional identification with the bodily Christ and the passions of Jesus ... lyric poetry , with women and with nature , these associations are used differently to con- struct particular ...
... lyric . The lines therefore have a different function : they are emblematic , indicating the poem's conclusion before it has prop- erly started . A major difference from The Owl and the Nightingale is immediately apparent : where the ...
... lyric , 35 in this debate it is the aristocracy that appears to win the arguments by setting the poem on the ground of the lyric itself . To be more precise : an es- tablished confrontation between nightingale - female - victim and ...