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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... 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 and contain individuals in the same ...
... victim in The Owl and the Nightingale and not subject to a violent male attack , she is defined by the slipperiness of her ' wise tunge ' while the owl's physical threats echo those of the Greek hawks . What is missing is the gendering ...
... victim- ization , Bianca's final words are not aimed at the lover who has abandoned her but at the nightingales that ' sing through [ her ] head ' . The chorus of nightingales may appear to invoke the classical victim I suggest lies ...