scholarly journals Sappho, Hegel and Michael Field: Paradox and desire in lyric III

2021 ◽  
pp. 49-63
Author(s):  
Mayron Estefan Cantillo-Lucuara
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Michael Field ◽  
Long Cycle ◽  
Unrequited Love ◽  
Dramatic Inquiry ◽  
Katharine Bradley

This article offers a close reading of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s lyric III in Long Ago, a Sapphic volume of verse published in 1889 under the collaborative nom de plume of Michael Field. This collection articulates a dramatic inquiry into the tragedy of unrequited love in a long cycle of lyrics whose third piece most effectively encapsulates the kernel of what the Fields reconstruct as Sappho’s ambivalent eroticism. The outcome of this reconstruction, as analysed in light of lyric III, is a consistent Hegelian view of desire that subsumes a complex system of tropes, myths, paradoxes and imaginative strategies under an overarching ideology of desire as a radical experience of appropriation, violence and self-destruction.

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.

scholarly journals “Come, Dark-eyed Sleep”: Michael Field and the Performance of the Lyric as a Radical Fantasy

2021 ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Mayron Estefan Cantillo Lucuara
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Michael Field ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Systematic Inquiry

This article seeks to illustrate how the Michael Fields articulate their Sapphic poetry in Long Ago (1889) not only in keeping with their own Shakespearean aspirations and with Robert Browning’s hybrid formula of dramatic lyrics, but also in connection with Jonathan Culler’s theory of the lyric as a performative genre. Much recent scholarship has broken ground in the rediscovery and reappraisal of the Fields’ literary stature, yet the general critical approach has been divisive in addressing their poetry and their verse dramas separately. Some critics have taken heed of how their lyrics in general exhibit an intrinsic dramatic temper, yet no systematic inquiry has discussed how this lyrical dramaticity is manifest in any particular instance. Thus, this article singles out Long Ago’s second poem for its powerful performative energy, offering a close reading of each line, and demonstrating that it amounts to a hybrid dramatic lyric, as well as a tragic and transgressive performance in which a new Sappho takes centre stage as a Dionysian apologist of radical erotic fantasies.

Michael Field’s Fragrant Imagination

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
Significant Role ◽  
Michael Field ◽  
Edith Cooper ◽  
Katharine Bradley

This chapter establishes the importance of perfume to Michael Field, the female aesthetes Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, and shows how it plays a significant role both in the poetry produced by Bradley and in entries in the women’s shared diary, especially those written by Cooper. Often exchanged in the form of gifts and scented flowers, perfume is strongly associated by both women with love but also with poetic creativity, as in Bradley’s verse, which celebrates her tender amatory feelings for Cooper but also her deep affection for the artist Charles Ricketts. The chapter concludes with a reading of one of Bradley’s most accomplished poems, which can be regarded as a poetic scented signature, expressing the essence of Michael Field.

scholarly journals Sappho in Lyric IV: Michael Field’s Spatial Poetics of Desire and Defeat

2021 ◽  
Vol 63 ◽  
pp. 95-109
Author(s):  
Mayron Estefan Cantillo-Lucuara
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Spatial Poetics ◽  
Edith Cooper ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The One ◽  
Katharine Bradley

In this article, I offer a close reading of Michael Field’s Long Ago (1889), specifically of lyric IV, with the primary aim of showing how Katharine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper appropriate the archaic figure of Sappho, dramatise her Ovidian romantic tragedy and, in so doing, reconceptualise the notional category of spacein two complementary ways: on the one hand, lyric space becomes a tense locus of contention between form-as-hope and content-as-despair and, on the other, the correlation established between space, nature and gender results in a transgressive topography in which, as I conclude, a new Sappho emerges both as a tragic heroine and as an extremely possessive consciousness laden with sheer Hegelian desire.

Perfumed Melodies, Violet Memories

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
Michael Field ◽  
Literary Genealogy ◽  
Single Flower ◽  
Literary Origins ◽  
Katharine Bradley

This chapter focuses on the fragrance of single flower—the violet—which although often associated with the modest Victorian maiden, has an alternative literary genealogy that links its scent not just to memory, death, mourning, and remembrance, but also specifically to music and poetry. After tracking its influential literary origins in Shakespeare and Bacon, the chapter shows how violet scent encrypts memories of Shelley and Keats that haunt the Victorian imagination, and traces that memorial scent as it permeates various later Victorian lyrics to be finally expressed in a sonnet of 1901 by Katharine Bradley, the older half of the poetic couple who write as Michael Field.

scholarly journals ‘The Eyes of an Intellectual Vampire’: Michael Field, Vernon Lee and Female Masculinities in Late Victorian Aestheticism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frankie Dytor
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender Difference ◽  
Michael Field ◽  
Gender Variant ◽  
Previous Generation ◽  
Vernon Lee ◽  
Edith Cooper ◽  
Katharine Bradley

Abstract This article reframes debate on the intersections of female aestheticism and cultural dissidence by focusing on the construction of queer masculinities at the end of the nineteenth century. Looking at the diary of Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), it examines the descriptions of Vernon Lee, Clementina (‘Kit’) Anstruther-Thompson and Maud Cruttwell during the Fields’ trip to Italy in 1895. The ambivalent presentation of these figures in the diary reveals a conflicted legacy of aestheticism, centred around the inheritance, interpretation and embodiment of queer masculinity. The article argues that the Fields developed themes associated with a previous generation of male aesthetes in order to articulate gender difference between themselves and other female-bodied aesthetes. In particular, it considers how the gender-variant Fields rejected Lee, Anstruther-Thomson and Cruttwell’s trans-masculinities as perversions of their sex.

A Reproducible Selective Stain for Cardiac Sarcoplasmic Reticulum

1974 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 214-215
Author(s):  
R. A. Waugh ◽  
J. R. Sommer
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
Electron Microscope ◽  
Sarcoplasmic Reticulum ◽  
Transmission Electron Microscope ◽  
Electron Microscopic ◽  
Cardiac Sarcoplasmic Reticulum ◽  
Transmission Electron

Cardiac sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) is a complex system of intracellular tubules that, due to their small size and juxtaposition to such electron-dense structures as mitochondria and myofibrils, are often inconspicuous in conventionally prepared electron microscopic material. This study reports a method with which the SR is selectively “stained” which facilitates visualizationwith the transmission electron microscope.

Achy Breaky Hearts on Both Sides of the Unrequited Love Experience

1994 ◽  
Vol 39 (11) ◽  
pp. 1023-1024
Author(s):  
Beverley Fehr
Keyword(s):  
Unrequited Love
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