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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... silence the voice of art , of the nightingale , they also silence that of history which relativizes the forms that structures take . Whereas the Greek versions of the myth focus on the relationships between the figures , and turn Procne ...
... fêtes de mai are more pertinent . The figure cannot be divorced from its class- determined context , and be given a single ' medieval ' profile . To do so is to silence the variety of meanings accorded 60 Interpreting Nightingales.
... silence its disruptive potential . Yet again the nightingale serves as an effec- tive index of these changing boundaries . Tracing the voice of the nightingale in Victorian poetry may well reflect on the self- enclosed ' expressive ...