Throughout history the poetic muse has tended to be (a passive) female and the poet male. This dynamic caused problems for late Victorian and twentieth-century women poets; how could the muse be reclaimed and moved on from the passive role of old? Parker looks at fin-de-siècle and modernist lyric poets to investigate how they overcame these challenges and identifies three key strategies: the reconfiguring of the muse as a contemporary instead of a historical/mythological figure; the muse as a male figure; and an interchangeable poet/muse relationship, granting agency to both.

Throughout history the poetic muse has tended to be (a passive) female and the poet male. This dynamic caused problems for late Victorian and twentieth-century women poets; how could the muse be reclaimed and moved on from the passive role of old? Parker looks at fin-de-siècle and modernist lyric poets to investigate how they overcame these challenges and identifies three key strategies: the reconfiguring of the muse as a contemporary instead of a historical/mythological figure; the muse as a male figure; and an interchangeable poet/muse relationship, granting agency to both.

This book rereads and re-examines the important tradition of women poets and theorists who have both critically and creatively engaged with the study and reconsideration of the role played by myths in our Western society, assessing their impact in different eras. Such poets and theorists as H.D., Laura Riding, Denise Levertov, Margaret Atwood, Anne Carson, and Natalie Diaz have responded to myths, either by recreating, rewriting, and interrogating the power of myths to articulate our reality, or by creating and “begetting” new myths for the present. In order to interrogate whether myths throughout the 20th and 21st centuries can act as catalysts for new ideas and imaginative re-creations, this volume travels the path of essential works of poetry by women.

Michael Field, the poetic identity created by Katharine Bradley (1846-1914) and her niece Edith Cooper (1862-1913), ceaselessly experimented with forms of identity and forms of literary expression. The Forms of Michael Field argues that their modes of self-creation are analogous to their poetic creations, and that exploring them in tandem is the best way to understand Michael Field’s cultural and literary importance. Michael Field deploys a different form in each volume of their lyric poetry: translations of Sappho, ekphrasis, songs, sonnets, and devotional verse. They also appropriate and revise the dramatic genres of verse tragedy and the masque. Each of these experiments in form enable Michael Field to differently address the cultural questions that beset late-Victorian women writers. Drawing on the insights of new lyric studies and new formalism, this book analyzes Michael Field’s continual quest for the aesthetic forms that best express their evolving ideas about identity and sexuality, gender and sacrifice, lyric voice and authority.

The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature examines literary representations of lesbian sexuality, identities, and communities, from the medieval period to the present. In so doing, it delivers insight into the variety of traditions that have shaped the present landscape of lesbian literature.

While fat sexual bodies are highly visible as vehicles for stigma, there has been a lack of scholarly research addressing this facet of contemporary body politics. Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism seeks to rectify this, bringing debates about fat sex into the academic arena and providing a much-needed critical space for voices from across the spectrum of theory and activism. It examines the intersection of fat, sex and sexuality within a contemporary cultural landscape that is openly hostile towards fat people and their perceived social and aesthetic transgressions. Acknowledging and engaging with some of the innovative work being done by artists, activists, and academics around the issue of fat sex, this collection both challenges preconceptions regarding fatness and sexuality, but also critiques and debates various aspects of the fat activist approach. It draws on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, bringing together work from the UK, US, Europe, and Australia to offer a wide-ranging examination of the issues of size, sex, and sexuality. A cutting-edge exploration not only of fat sex, but of identity politics, neoliberalism and contemporary body activism in general, Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism will be of interest to scholars of sociology, cultural studies, geography, porn studies and literary studies working on questions of gender, sexuality and the body.

The ranks of English women writers rose steeply in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, contributing to the era’s revolutionary social movements as well as to transforming literary genres in prose and poetry. The phenomena of ‘the new’ — ‘New Women’, ‘New Unionism’, ‘New Imperialism’, ‘New Ethics’, ‘New Critics’, ‘New Journalism’, ‘New Man’ — are this moment’s touchstones. This book tracks the period's new social phenomena and unfolds its distinctively modern modes of writing. It provides expert introductions amid new insights into women’s writing throughout the United Kingdom and around the globe.

The New Woman sought vast improvements in Victorian culture that would enlarge educational, professional, and domestic opportunities. Although New Women resist ready classification or appraisal as a monolithic body, they tended to share many of the same beliefs and objectives aimed at improving female conditions. While novels about the iconoclastic New Woman have garnered much interest in recent decades, poetry from the cultural and literary figure has received considerably less attention. Yet the very issues that propelled New Woman fiction are integral to the poetry of the fin de siècle. This book – the first in-depth account on the subject – enriches our knowledge of exceptionally gifted writers, including Mathilde Blind, M. E. Coleridge, Olive Custance, and Edith Nesbit. It focuses on their long-neglected British verse, analyzing its treatment of crucial matters on both the personal and public level to provide the attention the poetry so richly deserves.

In the last twenty years, Michael Field has emerged as one of the most fascinating poets of the Victorian era. Through their collaborative partnership as “Michael Field,” Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper engaged in the aesthetic and decadent movements of the fin de siècle, while their poetry and verse drama articulate ideas associated with the New Woman and boldly express queer and lesbian desire. Michael Field: Decadent Moderns extends the focus on these key literary and cultural contexts by emphasizing their continuing significance within twentieth-century literary modernism. Through a series of interdisciplinary essays, this book addresses Michael Field’s energetic engagements with a range of topics including ecology, perfume, tourism, art history, sculpture, formalism, classics, and book history. In doing so, Michael Field: Decadent Moderns highlights the modernity, radicalism, and relevance of their work, both within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as in our own cultural moment. Contributors: Leire Barrera-Medrano, Joseph Bristow, Jill R. Ehnenn, Sarah E. Kersh, Kristin Mahoney, Catherine Maxwell, Alex Murray, Sarah Parker, Margaret D. Stetz, Kate Thomas, and Ana Parejo Vadillo.

While W. B. Yeats’s influential account of the ‘Tragic Generation’ claims that most fin-de-siècle poets died, or at least stopped writing, shortly after 1900, this book explodes this narrative by attending to the twentieth-century poetry produced by women poets Alice Meynell, Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Dollie Radford, and Katharine Tynan. While primarily associated with the late nineteenth century, these poets were active in the twentieth century, but their later writing is overlooked in modernist-dominated studies, partly due to this poetry’s adherence to traditional form. This book reveals that these poets, far from being irrelevant to modernity, used these established forms to address contemporary concerns, including suffrage, sexuality, motherhood, and the First World War. The chapters focus on Meynell’s manipulations of metre to contemplate temporality and literary tradition; Michael Field’s use of blank verse to portray the conflicted modern woman; Radford’s adaptation of the aesthetic song-like lyric to tackle the experience of the city, urban crime, and suffrage; and Tynan’s employment of the ballad to soothe bereaved mothers during the First World War. This book ultimately shows that traditional forms played a vital role in shaping mature women poets’ responses to modernity, illuminating debates about form, tradition, and gender in twentieth-century poetry.