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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... silence of spring nights , associated with beautiful , melancholy subjective verse . This is the nightingale of the enlightenment subject , familiar as the most romantic of ' poetic ' tropes from the most famous of all nightingale poems ...
... silence the voice of art , of the nightingale , they also silence that of history which relativizes the forms that structures take . Whereas the Greek versions of the myth focus on the relationships between the figures , and turn Procne ...
... silence ? '46 Starting from this assumption of a single ' literary tradition ' , Rosenblum then moves to a meticulous discussion of the bewildering ambiguity caught in the portrait of the dead mother in Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh ...