scholarly journals Michael Field’s “A Dance of Death”

Nordlit ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
LeeAnne Richardson
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
Michael Field ◽  
Dance Of Death ◽  
Alternate Version ◽  
Poetic Identity ◽  
Edith Cooper ◽  
Artistic Vision ◽  
Authorial Persona

The 1912 poem "A Dance of Death" by Michael Field (pen name of Katherine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper) depicts Salome in an alternate version of the biblical story: this Salome dances on a frozen river, falls through the ice, and is decapitated on a jagged edge. Nonetheless, her beautiful head continues dancing over the frozen river. This poem is highly unusual, especially in the context of the other poems in the postconversion volume Poems of Adoration, because it questions, rather than submits to, authority. In re-writing a familiar Christian tale, as well as a familiar decadent theme, Field uses the poem to assert the supremacy of their artistic vision, which (despite their ardent Catholicism) cannot be subject to any law outside themselves. Like the continually dancing head of Salome, which continues to create beauty even after nature (and perhaps God) has struck it down, the poet is subjugate only to her own law and creates without boundaries or restrictions on her art. Bradley and Cooper were acutely aware of their authorial persona (actively taking not only a masculine but also a singular poetic identity), and their mode of reconciling the apparent contradictions of this identity are mirrored in their presentation of Salome in a "Dance of Death."

scholarly journals Teologi, Studi Biblika, dan Misi

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-131
Author(s):  
Ailsa Barker
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Missio Dei ◽  
People Of God ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
Ministerial Training ◽  
The People ◽  
God's People ◽  
Missional Engagement ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Church

Missional hermeneutics is the interpretation of Scripture as it relates to the missionary task of the church. Four elements comprise a missional hermeneutics: 1) the missional trajectory of the biblical story being the foremost element, which also underlies the other three, 2) a narrative throughout Scripture centered on Christ and intended to equip the people of God for their missional task, 3) the missional context of the reader, in which attention moves from the task of equipping to the community being equipped, a community that is active, and 4) a missional engagement with culture and the implications thereof. Through the life of God’s people an alternative is offered, together with an invitation to come and join. Because the separation of theology from the mission of the church has distorted theology, all theology needs to be reformulated from the perspective of missio Dei and from the realization that the church is a sent community, missional in its very being. A missional hermeneutics bears implications upon the congregation, worship, preaching, discipleship, education, ministerial training, and the missionary task in multicultural contexts.

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.

A Gender Perspective on the Daughters of Zelophehad: Bible, Talmudic Midrash, and Modern Feminist Midrash

2007 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yael Shemesh
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Gender Perspective ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Feminist Consciousness ◽  
The Law ◽  
The One

The biblical story of Zelophehad's daughters (Numbers 26 and 36, Josh. 17:3-6) and its avatars in talmudic midrashim and modern feminist midrashim are studied from a gender perspective. The biblical story is shown to be ambiguous, in that, on the one hand, its heroines are five impressive women who bring about a change in the law that bene ts certain women, while, on the other hand, it is firmly set in an androcentric patriarchal context whose focus is the survival of the father's name. Even though the biblical story is not feminist, it includes elements that made it possible for the feminist aspect to be raised in the talmudic midrashim (which other general praise for women as compared to men or recognition and acknowledgement of male discrimination against women)—and all the more so in modern feminist midrashim that present the five women as possessing a well-developed feminist consciousness and as a positive model of sisterhood.

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.

An identity structure in narrative

2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leor Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Elementary Schools ◽  
College Student ◽  
Impression Management ◽  
Identity Work ◽  
The Other ◽  
Female College Student ◽  
Narrative Construction ◽  
Poetic Identity ◽  
Discourse Functions ◽  
The One

This article refocuses the discussion of identity in narrative and practice by looking at structuring-in-practice and beyond to the discourse functions of identity. The narrative of an Ethiopian Israeli female college student is analyzed, wherein she tells about changing elementary schools — a context mirroring the immediate situation in her new academic setting. The analysis identifies and labels the partial, microgenetic elicitation of identity-attributable imagery in each utterance and then consolidates the accumulation of those images into the various groupings relevant in the narrative. In the particular narrative studied here all consolidated images contrast against the one identity-attributable image that is interactionally advantageous. This result, found in all 28 prototypical narratives in my corpus of 46, is evidence of a poetic identity structuring of narrative serving two discourse functions: (1) metasemantic- the contrastive identity work creates and indexes the narrative’s Complication and its subsequent Resolution; (2) metapragmatic- the contrastive identity work creates and indexes the identity for impression management. The contrastive basis of the poetic identity structure of narrative is indicative of much Western identity and narrative construction. Thus, identity and narrative are shown to stand in reflexive relation one to the other, where identity is an ‘indexical icon’, a map of itself drawn in the very narrative from which it emerges.

Spiegelschau im Garten Eden Amico Aspertinis Genesis-Stich

2018 ◽  
Vol 81 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-79
Author(s):  
Maurice Saß
Keyword(s):  
Original Sin ◽  
The Other ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
Adam And Eve ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
General Importance ◽  
Man In The Middle ◽  
The One ◽  
Main Attribute

Abstract This paper focuses on Amico Aspertini’s engraving Genesis Scene with Fall, Expulsion, Adam and Eve after the Fall, and Abel’s Sacrifice, a complex allegory that places a self-mirroring man in the middle of the events. The aim of the article is to highlight the general importance of the mirror motif in representations of the biblical story of Eden. On the one hand, the seduction of Eve was understood as a visual event and as an act of artful illusion. On the other hand, envy (invidia) or, alternatively, pride (superbia) was considered to be the reason for the original sin. And either personification had a mirror as its main attribute. Aspertini’s engraving takes up this understanding of the fall to show that his own art and more generally all figurative imitations thrive on the productive tension between diabolic allurement and divine vision.

Short Stories, Poems, Letters

2018 ◽  
pp. 101-112
Author(s):  
Hugh Adlington
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
The Other ◽  
Authorial Persona ◽  
Private Version ◽  
Dividing Line

This chapter reviews the most neglected forms of Penelope Fitzgerald’s writing: her short stories, poems and letters. Although Fitzgerald claimed not to be able to write short stories, the evidence of the ten stories collected in The Means of Escape, and of the other eleven uncollected stories that survive, suggests otherwise. The chapter shows how Fitzgerald’s short fiction shares with her novels themes of misunderstanding, disappointment and loneliness. Other continuities include Fitzgerald’s tragicomic wit, art of compression, and taste for the macabre. Yet the chapter also shows how the stories differ from the novels. The sense of disruption of the accepted order of things is concentrated in the stories to the point of menace. The author’s presence, more pervasive and inescapable in the stories than in the novels, obscures the dividing line between author and narrator. By contrast, Fitzgerald’s handful of poems are surprisingly intimate and self-revealing, confronting the reader with a starker, more private version of Fitzgerald’s authorial persona. The letters, written to family, friends, literary editors and writers, provide a different kind of evidence of Fitzgerald’s sharp wit, intelligence and powers of observation.

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