Michael Field's Revisionary Poetics

Examines history, modernity, gender, and sexuality through the literary innovations of two late-Victorian female co-authors Offers new readings of a wide range of Michael Field texts (Callirrho , 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Underneath the Bough, Wild Honey, Poems of Adoration, Mystic Trees, Whym Chow, the joint diary Works and Days and many unpublished poems) Uses interdisciplinary methods to bring Michael Field's life and work in conversation with queer and feminist approaches to literary form, art history,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 studies Identifies 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 epistemologies Traces resonances between fin-de-si cle culture and today's theoretical debates about historicist vs. presentist approaches to the archive and Foucauldian vs. phenomenological understandings of subjectivity, gender and sexuality Situates 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 centuries All 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-si cle and invites readers, like Michael Field themselves, to engage the past in order to create transtemporal community and to make sense of the present.

Jill R. Ehnenn is Professor of English at Appalachian State University, where she is also standing faculty in the Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies Program. Her research interests include Victorian literature and culture, especially British aestheticism; ekphrasis and the visual arts; LGBTQ literary history; and feminist and queer theory. She has published on a wide range of nineteenth-century writers and is the author of Women’s Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture(2008/ 2017).