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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... ( masculine ) power - works as a covert recognition of his disruptive presence within her world and thus eroticizes the whole exchange . In this exchange the nightingale's role is crucial to the balance between the two figures and their ...
... masculine conflict which in reality defines chivalric iden- tity . Yet the strategy of putting a female figure in a position of control and depicting the whole company equally engaged in comforting and nurturing , unavoidably conjures ...
... masculine accomplishment signified by learning classical languages . She relates it to Walter Ong's description of the implications of learn- ing Latin for boys in the Renaissance : ' [ It was ] a puberty rite designed not only to ...