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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... political society ( as in the pastoral or the early Christian lyrics ) , it becomes the vehicle for fables , where interest lies in the narrative line rather than in investigations of poetic ambiguity or philosophy . This is clearly ...
... political significance of Ovid's disruptive playfulness . Despite the great differences between them , similar political implications can be seen in the poem on the nightingale by Fulbert of Chartres ( see p . 239 ) . The poem reflects ...
... political entity , nor , without that , one of the individual subject either , both facets are blurred and uncertain ... political ' reality ' in which she is denied being and the aesthetic text which she is actively creating using ...