Michael Field in Context (Literature in Context)

By: Sarah Parker

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Synopsis: Few authors attract as much fascination as 'Michael Field', the collaborative pseudonym of Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913), an aunt and niece living and working together in devoted fellowship. As Michael Field, Bradley and Cooper published over thirty volumes of poetry and verse drama across a career lasting from the 1880s to the 1910s. Here, chapters by thirty-six experts introduce the historical and cultural contexts crucial to understanding Field's work, including the late-Victorian aesthetic and decadent movements, fin-de-siècle poetry, and debates around gender and sexuality. Michael Field's connections with other authors, including Wilde, Pater, and New Women writers are also explored. Experimental in lyric poetry, ekphrasis, verse drama, and the prose poem, and fascinated by the ancient worlds of Greece, Rome and Egypt, the Renaissance, and the Romantic era, Michael Field's work remains profoundly relevant to current debates, including ecology, race, empire, and gender non-conformity.