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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... textual frame because the argument is weighted in favour of one of the parties . The gendered distinc- tion between form and content is thus blurred and the active masculine reader is placed in a passive ( feminized ) role in relation ...
... textual voices from beyond their own textual frame , the relation between the debate and a specific class ideology is complicated even when , as in The Floure and the Leaf , the text attempts to align itself with the dominant ideology ...
... textual strategy , integrating disparate elements into a harmonious whole . In an unfocused world the reader - like the narrator drawn into understanding the world through visual images — unconsciously seeks visual stimulus . In this ...