Interpreting Nightingales: Gender, Class and HistoriesBloomsbury Academic, 1997 M07 1 - 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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... identity which occur within a specialized discourse such as poetry . Poetry foregrounds the various relations of the ' feminine ' to a changing ' masculine ' ; of the ' natural ' to what is seen as ' human ' ; of the ambiguous literary ...
... identity , the place of transformation is literalized , no longer that of poetry , of the imag- ination reflecting back on the previous existence , but separated and named as the place of the blissful afterlife . This literalization and ...
... identity : their cultural power lay , not in merit ( reason ) , but in blood lines ( nature ) . The three poems on which this chapter focuses are the thir- teenth - century ' The Thrush and the Nightingale ' , the late four- teenth ...