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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... references to the melancholy lay of aedonis or aedon , and to the lament for Itys ... [ are ] for the most part , veiled allusions to the worship of Adonis or Atys ... the mysterious and melancholy ritual of the departing year when ...
... references to the bird ( also in The Suppliant Maidens ) ( see p . 228 ) , and with the later references in Euripides ' Hecuba ( see p . 229 ) and Helen ( see p . 229 ) , the Philomela myth seems to lie beneath the surface plot ...
... references to the nightingale in Greek poetry , it is significant that so few occur in Latin , perhaps indicating that its association with a recognizably unstable social identity - so potent for Athens during the Peloponnesian war - is ...