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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... past and the past versions of the literary nightingale press , overwhelming and almost suffocating her indi- vidual cry even as they figure its enablement . The poem is a tour de force of past images and literatures . These nightingales ...
... past into her present . In the modern epic of Aurora Leigh , for example , dramatic interest moves into the psyche and the heroic struggle takes place against received patterns of behaviour , that inheritance of the past , rather than ...
... past : the fact that the complex voice of the poem takes and transforms the voice of a younger self which itself takes on and transforms that of the sixteenth - century Camoëns . Armstrong sees the poem in terms of its consideration of ...