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
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... narrator's description of the ordered grove of oaks she visits after dressing : each is ' streight as a line ...... . / ... . / ... .. and an eight foot or nine / Every tree well fro his fellow grew ' ( 11. 29-32 ) . Yet again there is ...
... narrator's dream , and leaves the outer world to the margins of the poem . This text does the opposite , setting the aristocratic world at the very heart of the text , with the narrator's inner space providing its frame . Yet The Floure ...
... narrator's dislocation is indicated when she arrives alone , and when the two birds arrive before the two companies . What the narrator gazes at ( with unexpressed desire ) indicates that from which she is severed - the social world of ...