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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... speak . 12 Joplin sees the myth as caught within a cycle of ' violation - revenge- violation '13 which assures the continued ' appropriation of the women's power to speak ' by seeing any rebellion in terms of the murderous conclusion of ...
... speak for her . ' I would argue that the human story caught within the myth may point towards a ' deadly ' structure but the very inscription of that myth points outwards to other readings and possibilities.17 The nightingale's voice in ...
... speak outside the hierarchical structures that endlessly define and contain individuals in the same way , impossible to recover ' women's power to speak ' . If such accounts silence the voice of art , of the nightingale , they also ...