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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... point out , the text draws consciously on these affiliations , and , as Lewis points out , it is written in a verse form unusual enough to draw attention to its own making . This literary self - consciousness - the dreaming poet ...
... points of origin . In the process however still more boundaries were disrupted , most significantly that between the human and the natural . The nightingale's asso- ciations with the feminine and the natural , with literary models of ...
... points out that colour has emblematic importance in medi- eval poetry : red conveys excitement , richness and heraldry , and green — the colour of nature - ambiguously calls up the regeneration of spring as well as the instability of ...