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.

scholarly journals Märta Tikkanen’s gender and alcohol saga

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 289-298
Author(s):  
Anne-Marie Mai
Keyword(s):  
Alcohol Abuse ◽  
Married Couple ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Public ◽  
Love Story ◽  
Public Recognition ◽  
Alcohol Abuser ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Poetry Collection

Märta Tikkanen’s poetry collection Århundradets kärlekssaga ( The love story of the century, 1978) is a confessional book on life in a family where the husband and father is an alcohol abuser. It is also a love story about a married couple who love one another despite the terrible challenges posed to the relationship by alcoholism. The poetry collection became one of the most influential books in contemporary Nordic fiction, its themes on gender roles and alcohol abuse setting the trend in the Nordic discussion of women’s liberation. Märta Tikkanen’s courage to tell her own private story inspired other women to confess their gender equality problems to the public. The alcohol abuse of Märta Tikkanen’s husband Henrik Tikkanen was seen as an allegory for the more general problems in the relation between men and women. My essay introduces Märta Tikkanen’s poetry collection and discusses how the poems develop the theme of gender and alcohol. I will also compare her description of their marriage with Henrik Tikkanen’s self-portrait in his autobiographical novella Mariegatan 26, Kronohagen (1977). The analysis refers to contemporary research on gender and alcohol abuse and discusses how the poems contribute to a public recognition of the relationship between gender and alcohol abuse. The essay discusses the reception of Märta Tikkanen’s influential poems and explores her treatment of alcohol and gender in relation to other Nordic confessional or fictional books on alcohol abuse.

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.

Ballad Knowledge and the Poetics of Repetition

2020 ◽  
pp. 109-140
Author(s):  
Alexandra Socarides
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Female Figure ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Traditional Ballads ◽  
And Gender

Chapter 3 explores a genre (the ballad) that was wildly popular in nineteenth-century America, and investigates the ways in which women poets entered into discussions about authorship, poetics, and gender through their engagements with it. Focusing in particular on tropes of faithlessness, pride, laziness, and general “badness” that had long marked traditional ballads, this chapter shows how these tropes came to be associated with women and how American periodicals seemed to embrace the circulation of such ballads. But as women poets took up this genre and were faced with how to rewrite this female figure, they pushed its primary convention—repetition—to its limits in order to make explicit the particular problem that accompanies the recitation of “ballad knowledge” for women. Instead of looking away from the scenes of repetition that disempower women, these ballads go right to the center, employing repetitions to new ends.

Improv, Shakespeare, and Drag: A Conversation with Impromptu Shakespeare

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 214-222
Author(s):  
Ailis Duff ◽  
Rebecca MacMillan ◽  
Marina Cano
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Love Affair ◽  
Research Associate ◽  
And Performance ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The University

This interview took place during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (August 2017), where Impromptu Shakespeare has been performing since 2013. An improvised theatre group, Impromptu Shakespeare weaves in one new ‘Shakespeare’ play at every show. The conversation was led by Marina Cano, as part of her research on improvised Shakespeare and improvised Jane Austen. It involved Impromptu actors Ailis Duff and Rebecca MacMillan, and touched upon matters of improvisation, methodology, adaptation, Shakespeare on stage, and gender-blind performance. Marina Cano is a Research Associate at the University of Limerick, Ireland. She is the author of Jane Austen and Performance (Palgrave 2017) and the co-editor of Jane Austen and William Shakespeare: A Love Affair in Literature, Film, and Performance (Palgrave 2019).

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

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.

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