Michael Field's Revisionary Poetics

Abstract

All authors try to do something new, or tell an old story in a new way; but for Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who called themselves "Poets and Lovers" and who wrote as Michael Field, re-writing old stories, history, and traditional literary forms with extraordinary innovation was nothing short of high art. This book asks: How do ambitious experiments with a joint diary, closet drama, ekphrasis, elegy, and nature, devotional, and love poetry help Michael Field navigate the paradox of looking backward in order to achieve their goal “to make all things new”? How do their revisionary poetics help the coauthors, 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.