Michael Field's Revisionary Poetics / / Jill Ehnenn.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2023 English
• VerfasserIn: Ehnenn, Jill,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2023]; ©2023
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Language: English
• Series: Nineteenth-Century and Neo-Victorian Cultures
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (288 p.) :; 16 B/W illustrations 16 B&W images

Examines history, modernity, gender, and sexuality through the literary innovations of two late-Victorian female co-authorsOffers new readings of a wide range of Michael Field texts (Callirrhoë, Fair Rosamund, Canute the Great, Long Ago, Sight and Song, Underneath the Bough, Wild Honey, Poems of Adoration, Mystic Trees, Whym Chow, the joint diary Works and Days and many unpublished poems)Uses interdisciplinary methods to bring Michael Field’s life and work in conversation with queer and feminist approaches to literary form, art history, ecocriticism, disability studies and religious studiesIdentifies the literary, visual, and philosophical precursors of Michael Field’s adaptations and proposes that we read their appropriations as a deliberate blend of objective and subjective epistemologiesTraces resonances between fin-de-siècle culture and today’s theoretical debates about historicist vs. presentist approaches to the archive and Foucauldian vs. phenomenological understandings of subjectivity, gender and sexualitySituates Michael Field in relation to literary texts and philosophical thought of their contemporaries—the late Victorians and Decadent Moderns with whom they bridge the nineteenth and twentieth centuriesAll authors try to do something new, or tell an old story in a new way; but for Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote as Michael Field and called themselves ‘Poets and Lovers’, rewriting old stories, history and traditional literary forms with extraordinary innovation was nothing short of high art. Offering new readings of a wide range of Michael Field texts, this book asks: how do ambitious experiments with a joint diary, closet drama, ekphrasis, elegy and nature, devotional and love poetry help these women navigate the paradox of looking backward in order to achieve their goal ‘to make all things new’? How do their revisionary poetics help the co-authors, as queer, female Aesthetes, cope with late-Victorian modernity? Through an interdisciplinary approach to their passionate and sometimes eccentric life and work, this book provokes thought about the fin-de-siècle and invites readers, like Michael Field themselves, to engage the past in order to create transtemporal community and to make sense of the present.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Figures -- Acknowledgments -- Series Preface -- Making All Things New: An Introduction -- 1 Rewriting History: The Early Plays and Long Ago -- 2 Ekphrastic Poetics in and after Sight and Song -- 3 “Come and sing”: Elizabethan Temper, Eco-entanglement, and Lyric in Underneath the Bough -- 4 “Our dead”: Michael Field and the Elegiac Tradition -- 5 Becoming Catholic, Desiring Disability: Michael Field’s Devotional Verse -- Writing a Life: A Conclusion and a Provocation -- Bibliography -- Index