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
Results 1-3 of 47
... structure of meaning indicates that Philomela appears to lose her place in the defining structures of family or social grouping : she is neither married nor unmarried ; she is a rival to her own sister ; she is shut up in a forest hut ...
... structure in which woman is always a victim and always a victim in the same way : in such circumstances there is no possibility of change - and thus it is impossible to speak outside the hierarchical structures that endlessly define ...
... structure which foregrounds conflict as an ( un- stable ) means of achieving stability and consensus . The result is that both of these texts display characteristics of self - reflection on the part of their narrators ( mirroring the ...