Interpreting Nightingales: Gender, Class and HistoriesBloomsbury Academic, 1997 M07 1 - 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
Results 1-3 of 66
... role in the various ideological constructions of the human sphere . That the bird associated with erotic desire and the aristocratic poetry that celebrates and idealizes that desire should appear simultaneously in both religious verse ...
... role as a prophet speaking from the edges of a benighted society . By the mid - nineteenth century , however , neither the purity of nature nor the prophetic role of the poet seemed tenable . As Beer points out , Darwin effectively ...
... role of the 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 ...