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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... tion are interesting on a number of levels : the woman / listener is punished for her transgression , her desire to move out of the symbolic enclosure of the house , her wish to move into the natural world outside of her window . The ...
Gender, Class and Histories Jeni Williams. tion in terms of inversion . This indication of an interest in public values is reinforced by the exposition ... tion of the noble lover . The introduction of this Debating Class and Gender 99.
... tion of desire itself . The two coincide in the text's evocation of the idealized aesthetic world of the aristocratic lyric , and the simul- taneous displacement of the old man within this setting . Inca- pable of either the heroic ...