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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... repression of the feminine / class other . In the alienated , self - conscious context of nineteenth - century writing , however , a simple confrontation between individual desire and an ideology which represses that desire but offers ...
... repression : the alterna- tive to Aurora's world of love and art is one in which the abstract repression of the feminine is literalized in the repression of 202 Interpreting Nightingales.
Gender, Class and Histories Jeni Williams. repression of the feminine is literalized in the repression of wom- en - most shockingly through rape and prostitution . The myth of Danaë , the girl raped by a shower of gold , is as pertinent ...