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'Michael Field'

'Michael Field'

'Michael Field'

Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle
Marion Thain, University of Birmingham
December 2007
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Adobe eBook Reader
9780511352751

    'Michael Field' (1884–1914) was the pseudonym of two women, the aunt and niece Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who lived and wrote together as 'lovers'. The large oeuvre contains poems, dramas, and a vast diary. Marion Thain recounts the development of a fascinating and idiosyncratic poetic persona, which became a self-reflexive study in aestheticism. The constructed life and work of 'Michael Field' is used here to deepen and complicate our understanding of many of the most distinctive aesthetic debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; a process unified by the recurring engagement with theories of time and history that structures this book. This analysis of poetry, aestheticism and the fin de siècle, through the performance of 'Michael Field', has implications that reach far beyond an understanding of one poet's work. Scholars of both Victorian and modernist literature will learn much from this innovative and compelling study.

    • The full-length study of this fascinating literary persona, the pseudonym of two female writers
    • Sets Michael Field in the context of nineteenth-century literature and aestheticism
    • Offers an entirely fresh take on aetheticism and culture at the turn of the century

    Reviews & endorsements

    "Thain's stimulating book will appeal not only to readers concerned with Michael Field, or readers concerned with the interplay between aestheticism, Decadence, sexuality, and religion at the fin de siecle, but also readers who are interested in thinking about the relationship between lyric poetry and other genres."
    -Stefanie Markovitz, Yale University, English Literature in Transition

    See more reviews

    Product details

    December 2007
    Adobe eBook Reader
    9780511352751
    0 pages
    0kg
    This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.

    Table of Contents

    • Acknowledgements
    • Introduction: 'something fierce, subtle, strange, singular'
    • 1. The diaries and dramas: life-writing and the temporal patterns of aestheticism
    • 2. Long Ago: the male pseudonym, fin-de-siècle sexualities and Sappho's historical leap
    • 3. Sight and Song: Botticelli and ekphrastic paradox
    • 4. Underneath The Bough: dual authorship and lyric song
    • 5. Wild Honey from Various Thyme: apian aestheticism and the lyric book collection
    • 6. The Catholic poetry: the spiritual and historical 'turn' of the century
    • Conclusion: modernism and the fin de siècle
    • Notes
    • Bibliography of material by Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper
    • General bibliography
    • Index.
      Author
    • Marion Thain , New York University