MICHAEL FIELD AND SAPPHIC FAME: “MY DARK-LEAVED LAURELS WILL ENDURE”

2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 649-661
Author(s):  
Francis O'Gorman
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Robert Browning ◽  
Michael Field ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Edith Cooper ◽  
Creative Force ◽  
Authentic Person

Long Ago(1889), Michael Field's inaugural collection of verse, celebrated Sappho, the ancient poetess of Lesbos. The volume proclaimed the diversity of her sexuality; it saluted verse that was connected to the self; and it urged the authenticity of her creative force in ages beyond her death. Taking surviving fragments of Sapphic writing as embarkation points for new poems in her spirit, Michael Field, the joint pseudonym of the two poets Katherine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913), hailed the continuing presence of the Greek in the modern age, drawing the reader back to an imagined version of Sappho's mind and experience, her desires and troubles, of which history held so slight a record. Developing ideas articulated by Robert Browning, particularly in the opening book ofThe Ring and the Book(1868–69),Long Agodiscerned in poetry a way of regenerating the energy – or of creating the illusion of such regeneration – of an almost-lost, but indisputably authentic person from the ancient Mediterranean. The volume privileged a post-Romantic assumption about the signal importance of the self behind writing, the complexities and contradictions of which I explore here, and it understood modern poetry's dealings with a nearly vanished Greece as recuperative of a nearly disappeared artist. As such,Long Agoimplicitly imagined the work of the contemporary poet as, to use Robert Browning's word, a matter of “galvanism” (Browning I.740): the calling back into the present of the lost forms of distant lives.

Love Triangle with Dog: Whym Chow, the “Michael Fields,” and the Poetic Potential of Human-Animal Bonds

Animalities ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen Glenney Boggs
Keyword(s):  
Queer Studies ◽  
Robert Browning ◽  
Michael Field ◽  
Edith Cooper ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Love Triangle

Boggs focuses on a volume of poetry titled Whym Chow: Flame of Love, which was published pseudonymously by Michael Field in 1914. While Victorian and queer studies have focused on other works produced by this author, who was actually two women—Katherine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper, both friends with Robert Browning—less attention has been paid to their later privately-published volume that commemorates their dog who had passed away several years before, a Chow named Whym. Boggs finds great potential in the poems for complicating theoretical explorations of “dog love”, and for rethinking subjectivity and kinship, particularly in terms of the queer potential of human-animal relationships. Rather than reading the poems as examples of anthropomorphism and a privileging of the human over the animal, Boggs sees them as deconstructing these distinctions, with the dog Whym as an “equal partner”.

DISABILITY AND GENDER IN THE VISUAL FIELD: SEEING THE SUBTERRANEAN LIVES OF MICHAEL FIELD'S WILLIAM RUFUS

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-152
Author(s):  
Sharon Bickle
Keyword(s):  
Women Poets ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Love Affair ◽  
Michael Field ◽  
Love Story ◽  
Multiple Voices ◽  
Successful Recovery ◽  
Edith Cooper ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
And Gender

When the UK'sGuardiannewspaper featured “La Gioconda” as poem of the week in January 2010, the paper's popular readership discovered what many late-Victorian scholars had known about for some time: the poetic partnership of Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913), known as “Michael Field.” The successful recovery of the Fields as significant late-Victorian writers – a project now in its second decade – seems poised to emerge into popular awareness driven as much by interest in their unconventional love affair as by the poetry itself. Scholars too have been seduced by the romance of a transgressive love story, and the critical nexus between sexuality and textuality has produced remarkable scholarship on the Fields’ lyric poetry: those texts in which the personas have a rough equivalence with Bradley and Cooper themselves. Yopie Prins first noted the complex engagement of multiple voices with lyric structure in Long Ago (74–111), and Ana Parejo Vadillo (Women Poets 175–95), Jill Ehnenn (73–96), and Hilary Fraser (553–56) expanded on this to uncover the transformation of the lyric's male gaze into a triangulated lesbian vision in Sight and Song (1892). In contrast to the recognition accorded their lyric verse, most critics have overlooked Michael Field's verse dramas. While there have been attempts to shift attention onto the plays, the significance of the Fields’ lesbian vision to the dramas has never been explored. This article seeks to redress this pervasive neglect and begin dismantling the boundaries that have grown up between critical approaches to the lyrics and the plays.

Lyric, Aestheticism and the Later Nineteenth Century

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Thain
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Michael Field ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Edith Cooper ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Katharine Bradley

Chapter 1 offers important historical and conceptual contexts for the late nineteenth century. The chapter suggests that ‘aestheticist lyric poetry’ might be usefully conceptualised ‘through the twin impetuses of conceptual expansion and formal reduction’. It then goes on to outline the context of ‘cultural modernity’, to which it is suggested aestheticist lyric poetry is responding, in order to define further the ‘crisis’ in lyric. It also introduces the three conceptual frames that set the remit for the three parts of the book; these are three key axes around which lyric poetry operates: time, space and subjectivity. Chapter 1 ends with a preliminary case study from the work of ‘Michael Field’ (the assumed name of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) to demonstrate in practice the relevance of the three frames to aestheticist poetry.

Adept Sailing before the Storm

2018 ◽  
pp. 68-100
Author(s):  
Barbara Lounsberry
Keyword(s):  
Michael Field ◽  
Outer World ◽  
Travel Diary ◽  
Edith Cooper ◽  
Artistic Self

Woolf's next two diary books, her 1932 diary and her 1933–34 diary, help her to navigate the difficult strait between the outer and the inner conflicts. She needs these diaries’ support, for, as the gathering outer storm forms, she faces both the strains of her inner artistic self and the loss of her friends. In late November of 1933, she consciously turns from the troubling outer world to the dual-voiced diary of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, the aunt and niece verse dramatists who published together under the name Michael Field. There, she finds not only lesbian playwrights and their trials but also the word “outsiders.” In February 1934, her response to a famous travel diary—Arthur Young’s Travels in France during the years 1787, 1788, 1789—shows her recoil from war.

Media Language and Representations of Identity

1999 ◽  
Vol 62 ◽  
pp. 57-71
Author(s):  
Allan Bell
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
The Self ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Anthony Giddens ◽  
The Media ◽  
Modern Identity ◽  
Late Modern

The use of language in the mass media is an act of identity. The media offer us representations of the identities of groups and individuals, and are even implicated in the very nature of contemporary identity. Drawing on the work of the British socio-logist Anthony Giddens on late modernity, this paper examines four aspects of identity in contemporary society, and illustrates and evidences them by analysis of New Zealand television advertisements. Firstly, human identity in the late modern age is 'reflexive', by which the media and their language reflect back images of the self. Secondly, modern identity is at least in part a 'narrative of the self, and many advertisements frame their appeal as aspects of personal biographies, including in particular personal choices and the lifestyle which constitutes them. Thirdly, the media are the crucial technologies in the re-organisation of time and place in the modern wodd, and offer a wodd for consumption. Lastly, the media are the means by which the global reaches into the local, and the local can be disseminated to the rest of the globe. These characteristics are manifested and identifiable across all levels of language.

A New Sketch of Edith Cooper ('Michael Field')

2005 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-82
Author(s):  
R. N. Morley
Keyword(s):  
Michael Field ◽  
Edith Cooper

The Cautionary Ontological Approach To Technology of Gabriel Marcel

1998 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Bernard A. Gendreau
Keyword(s):  
Negative Impact ◽  
Human Person ◽  
The Self ◽  
Gabriel Marcel ◽  
Human Predicament ◽  
Ontological Approach ◽  
Impact Of Technology ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Mystery Of Being ◽  
Authentic Person

I present the arguments of Gabriel Marcel which are intended to overcome the potentially negative impact of technology on the human. Marcel is concerned with forgetting or rejecting human nature. His perspective is metaphysical. He is concerned with the attitude of the "mere technician" who is so immersed in technology that the values which promote him as an authentic person with human dignity are discredited, omitted, denied, minimized, overshadowed, or displaced. He reviews the various losses in ontological values which curtail the full realization of the human person in his dignity. The impact of technology leads too often to a loss of the sense of the mystery of being and self, authenticity and integrity, the concrete and the existential, truth and dialogue, freedom and lover, humanity and community, fidelity and creativity, the natural and the transcendent, commitment and virtue, respect of the self and responsiveness to others, and especially of the spiritual and the sacred. Thus, the task of the philosopher is to be a watchman, un veilleur, on the alert for a hopeful resolution of the human predicament.

Sense of Self: Its Place in Personality Disturbance, Psychopathology, and Normal Experience

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-171
Author(s):  
Christopher Basten ◽  
Stephen Touyz
Keyword(s):  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
Normal Development ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Borderline Personality ◽  
The Self ◽  
Psychological Conditions ◽  
Working Definition ◽  
Personality Disturbance ◽  
Psychological Inquiry ◽  
Authentic Person

Sense of self (SOS) is a cornerstone of psychological inquiry and therapy and is a defining feature of a range of psychological conditions including borderline personality disorder, yet it is poorly understood. SOS is that continuous experience of being a complete and authentic person who feels in control of their own activities. It is a part of normal development of the self and, when weakened by trauma or developmental neglect, is a vulnerability for developing many different disorders, including depression and dissociative, personality, and eating disorders. This review aims to provide a working definition and description of SOS and to summarize its transdiagnostic role in contributing to psychological disorders. To achieve this aim, the article encompasses and unites the literature from various theoretical domains including developmental psychology, identity theory, cognitive psychology, personality disorders, and psychodynamic theories. Implications are raised for psychological therapy and research into psychopathology and its underpinnings.

scholarly journals Exploration of students’ thoughts about their right to freedom of education

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. SF50-SF58
Author(s):  
Olga Shugurova
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Education ◽  
Narrative Inquiry ◽  
The Self ◽  
Classroom Learning ◽  
Creative Force ◽  
Self Examination

In this reflective paper, I respond to Dr. Matusov’s (2020) eloquent philosophical exploration of “students’ right to freedom of education. In doing so, I pursue a narrative inquiry (Bruner, 1987; Clandinin, Murphy, Huber, & Orr, 2010; Clandinin, 2013; Hong, Falter, & Fecho, 2017) to explore my students’ self-generated meanings of their educational freedom in our teacher education classroom. I wonder whether freedom of education can be presented as a transcendental concept of self-examination and taught as the student’s right for it without a critical deconstruction of the tentious and fictitious materiality of freedom. Also, I wonder what my students think when they are provoked to claim their right to freedom of education. This reflection reveals that students’ right of freedom is not necessarily about their own self-examination, freedom is a creative force of self-expression. More specifically, freedom is the self-conscious act of discovery of itself (i.e., freedom) in everything my students do as a part of their classroom learning and education. All in all, freedom does not have any meaning at all since meaning emerges in the act of freedom itself, or rather in the creative act of being free.

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