Michael Field, the poetic identity created by Katharine Bradley (1846-1914) and her niece Edith Cooper (1862-1913), ceaselessly experimented with forms of identity and forms of literary expression. The Forms of Michael Field argues that their modes of self-creation are analogous to their poetic creations, and that exploring them in tandem is the best way to understand Michael Field’s cultural and literary importance. Michael Field deploys a different form in each volume of their lyric poetry: translations of Sappho, ekphrasis, songs, sonnets, and devotional verse. They also appropriate and revise the dramatic genres of verse tragedy and the masque. Each of these experiments in form enable Michael Field to differently address the cultural questions that beset late-Victorian women writers. Drawing on the insights of new lyric studies and new formalism, this book analyzes Michael Field’s continual quest for the aesthetic forms that best express their evolving ideas about identity and sexuality, gender and sacrifice, lyric voice and authority.
Author(s): LeeAnne M. Richardson
Series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 293
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
Forming Michael Field’s Life and Career
New Formalism and Michael Field
Organization of This Study
Chapter 2: Forming Michael Field
Becoming Michael Field
New Lyric/New Formalism
Michael Field’s Forms of Sexuality and Gender Performance
Michael Field and Religion
Michael Field, the Poetess, and the New Woman
Michael Field, Aestheticism, and the Modern
Chapter 3: Verse Tragedy/Closet Drama: Callirrhoë (1884)
The Affordances of Dramatic Form
Lyrics and Songs
The Faun and Machaon
Becoming Michael Field
Chapter 4: Songs: Underneath the Bough (1893/1898)
Lyric Theory/Song Theory
The Literary Context of Underneath the Bough
Why Revise and Decrease?
Revising and Reducing, and Rethinking the Format
Michael Field’s Evolving Persona
Coda: The American Edition and the Canon
Chapter 5: The Masque: Noontide Branches (1899)
The “sweet June-warm woman” Versus “Sweet Liberty”
The Form of the Masque
Reflection, Refraction, and Mirroring Techniques
Unrequited Love and Masculine Bonds
Perspective and Perception
The Triumph of Love and the Losses That Follow
Chapter 6: Sonnets and Sonnet Sequences: Wild Honey from Various Thyme (1908)
“Sonnettomania”
Wild Honey’s Shorter Sonnet Sequences
The Neo-Wordsworthian Nature Sequence
“The Longer Allegiance”
Love Sonnets
Chapter 7: Devotional Poetry: Poems of Adoration (1912)
Writing Devotional Poetry and Becoming Michael Field
Analogical Thinking from Bacchus to Jesus
Analogical Thinking in Poems of Adoration
Forms of Devotional Poetry
“A Dance of Death” in Poems of Adoration
Martyrs in Poems of Adoration
Sacrifice, Martyrdom, and Poetic Identity
Chapter 8: Devotional Poetry II: Mystic Trees (1913)
Literary Decadence
Decadent Rhythm and Rhyme in Mystic Trees
Identity/Trinity/Duality
Chapter 9: Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
