A melodious paean to the natural history and symbolic meaning of the most prized, poetized, and mythologized of songbirds. The nightingale has a unique place in cultural history: the most prized of songbirds, it has inspired more poems than any other creature, and it is also the most mythologized of birds.
Nightingalejuxtaposes the bird of poetry, music, myth, and lore with the living bird of wood and scrubland, unpicking the entangled relationship between them. Covering a huge range of poets, musicians, artists, nature writers, and natural historians—from Aristotle, Keats, and Vera Lynn to Bob Dylan—
Nightingalecharts our fascination through history with this nondescript yet melodious little brown bird. It also documents the nightingale’s disappearance from British breeding grounds and the implications this has for nightingale conservation.
Bethan Robertsis the William Noble Postdoctoral Research Associate in English at the University of Liverpool. She is the author ofCharlotte Smith and the Sonnet: Place, Tradition and Form in the Late Eighteenth Century.
"Roberts’sNightingalebegins with a declaration that 'this book isn’t about what I think or feel.' . . . She concentrates on the common nightingale (Luscinia megarhynchos) rather than the thrush nightingale (Luscinia luscinia) or their myriad imposters. Roberts balances glee with bewilderment, asking why this 'hectic, infinitely various yell' has been a source of enchantment. . . . In her chapters on music and conservation, Roberts offers welcome critiques of Athanasius Kircher’s failure to preserve nightingale songs in formal notation and of the composer Ottorino Respighi, who called for a phonograph recording of a nightingale to conclude his tone poem of 1924, 'The Pines of Rome.' . . . Reaching after fact and reason, Roberts, who is also a scholar of Romantic litelr
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