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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... woman ? is there a hidden threat should Camoëns be ' a suitor ' to a woman with less sweet eyes ? Barrett Browning clearly does not intend such a reading , but her text certainly allows it , and highlights the dangerous instability of ...
... woman blurs the physical and ideological boundaries that define this state . Her love for another slave ( ' Could a ... woman will meet and love her white child . And once the surface differences of white and black have been ...
... woman's monologue forms the kernel of the chanson dramatique , or a dialogue or scene in which the woman's part is usually dominant , or — in a small group standing [ related to the ] chansons de mai - the song of the nightingale in ...