Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

All authors try to do something new, or tell an old story in a new way; but for Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote as Michael Field and called themselves 'Poets and Lovers', rewriting old stories, history and traditional literary forms with extraordinary innovation was nothing short of high art. Offering new readings of a wide range of Michael Field texts, this book asks: how do ambitious experiments with a joint diary, closet drama, ekphrasis, elegy and nature, devotional and love poetry help these women navigate the paradox of looking backward in order to achieve their goal 'to make all things new'? How do their revisionary poetics help the co-authors, 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. Examines history, modernity, gender, and sexuality through the literary innovations of two late-Victorian female co-authorsOffers new readings of a wide range of Michael Field texts (Callirrhoë, Fair Rosamund, Canute the Great, Long Ago, Sight and Song, Underneath the Bough, Wild Honey, Poems of Adoration, Mystic Trees, Whym Chow, the joint diary Works and Days and many unpublished poems)Uses interdisciplinary methods to bring Michael Field's life and work in conversation with queer and feminist approaches to literary form, art history, ecocriticism, disability studies and religious studiesIdentifies the literary, visual, and philosophical precursors of Michael Field's adaptations and proposes that we read their appropriations as a deliberate blend of objective and subjective epistemologiesTraces resonances between fin-de-siècle culture and today's theoretical debates about historicist vs. presentist approaches to the archive and Foucauldian vs. phenomenological understandings of subjectivity, gender and sexualitySituates Michael Field in relation to literary texts and philosophical thought of their contemporaries-the late Victorians and Decadent Moderns with whom they bridge the nineteenth and twentieth centuriesAll authors try to do something new, or tell an old story in a new way; but for Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote as Michael Field and called themselves 'Poets and Lovers', rewriting old stories, history and traditional literary forms with extraordinary innovation was nothing short of high art. Offering new readings of a wide range of Michael Field texts, this book asks: how do ambitious experiments with a joint diary, closet drama, ekphrasis, elegy and nature, devotional and love poetry help these women navigate the paradox of looking backward in order to achieve their goal 'to make all things new'? How do their revisionary poetics help the co-authors, 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.

Field, Michael --- LITERARY CRITICISM / Feminist. --- Criticism and interpretation.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

The 11 newly commissioned essays collected in this volume demonstrate Jean Rhys's centrality to modernism and to postcolonial literature alike by addressing her stories and novels from the 1920s and 1930s, including Voyage in the Dark, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, and Good Morning, Midnight, as well as her later bestseller, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). The volume establishes Rhys as a major author with relevance to a number of different critical discourses, and includes a path-breaking section on affect theory that shows how contemporary interest in Rhys correlates with the recent 'affective turn' in the social sciences and humanities. As this collection shows, strangely haunting and deeply unsettling, Rhys's portraits of dispossessed women living in the early and late twentieth-century continue to trouble easy conceptualisations and critical categories.

Rhys, Jean --- Williams, Ella Gwendolen Rees --- Rees Williams, Ella Gwendolen --- Criticism and interpretation. --- LITERARY CRITICISM / Feminist.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Hélène Cixous, author of over forty works of fiction, was deemed by Derrida to be the greatest living writer in French in 1990. Consistent with this evaluation, her writing is renowned for its dense poetical texture and lyricism. At the same time, she has been described by one of Derrida's translator's, Peggy Kamuf, as 'one of our age's greatest semi-theoreticians'. Connecting these two views, this book argues for a consideration of her texts as 'semi-fictions'. Telling stories is, irreducibly, part of what Cixous does; it is irreducibly part of what she does. Fiction is at once the creation of an imaginary world and an ethical engagement, as intellectual as it is passionate, with the difficulties of the real. This book offers an in-depth reading of five different texts, addressing the idiomatic specificity of individual works and investigating how the textual fabric unfolds. It shows that the narrative dimension to Cixous's writing needs to be reckoned with as a key component of the way it troubles the borders between fiction and its others. Each work is approached in relation to a particular theoretical question or discourse to explore how, in staging an encounter with something beyond itself, her fiction is the site of an active thinking.

Romance Literatures --- Languages & Literatures --- French Literature --- Cixous, Hélène, --- Criticism and interpretation. --- Cixous, Hélène --- LITERARY CRITICISM / Feminist.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Linda Anderson explores Elizabeth Bishop's poetry, from her early days at Vassar College to her last great poems in Geography III and the later uncollected poems. Drawing generously on Bishop's notebooks and letters, the book situates Bishop both in her historical and cultural context and in terms of her own writing process, where the years between beginning a poem and completing it, for which Bishop is legendary, are seen as a necessary part of their composition. The book begins by offering a new reading of Bishop's relationship with Marianne Moore and with modernism. Through her journeys to Europe Bishop, it is also argued, learned a great deal from visual artists and from surrealism. However the book also follows the way Bishop came back to memories of her childhood, developing ideas about narrative, in order to explore time, both the losses it demands and the connections it makes possible. The lines of connections are both those between Bishop and her contemporaries and her context and those she inscribed through her own work, suggesting how her poems incorporate a process of arrival and create new possibilities of meaning.

Women and literature --- History --- Bishop, Elizabeth, --- בישופ, אליזבט, --- Criticism and interpretation. --- Bishop --- LITERARY CRITICISM / Feminist. --- Elizabeth --- 1911-1979

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Vegan literary studies has been crystallised over the past few years as a dynamic new specialism, with a transhistorical and transnational scope that both nuances and expands literary history and provides new tools and paradigms through which to approach literary analysis. Vegan studies has emerged alongside the 'animal turn' in the humanities. However, while veganism is often considered as a facet of animal studies, broadly conceived, it is also a distinct entity, an ethical delineator that for many scholars marks a complicated boundary between theoretical pursuit and lived experience. This collection of 25 essays maps and engages with that which might be termed the 'vegan turn' in literary theoretical analysis via essays that explore literature from across a range of historical periods, cultures and textual forms.

American literature --- English literature --- Ethics in literature. --- Food habits in literature. --- Veganism in literature. --- LITERARY CRITICISM / Feminist. --- History and criticism.