Carolyn Dever

Lisa Niles

A state-of-the-field review of critical perspectives on the work of Anthony Trollope.

The Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope

Why a monumental diary by an aunt and niece who published poetry together as “Michael Field”—and who were partners and lovers for decades—is one of the great unknown works of late-Victorian and early modernist literature Michael Field, the renowned late-Victorian poet, was well known to be the pseudonym of Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and her niece, Edith Cooper (1862–1913). Less well known is that for three decades, the women privately maintained a romantic relationship and kept a double diary, sharing the page as they shared a bed and eventually producing a 9,500-page, twenty-nine-volume story of love, life, and art in the fin de siècle. In Chains of Love and Beauty, the first book about the diary, Carolyn Dever makes the case for this work as a great unknown “novel” of the nineteenth century and as a bridge between George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, Victorian marriage plot and modernist experimentation. While Bradley and Cooper remained committed to publishing poetry under a single, male pseudonym, the diary, which they entitled Works and Days and hoped would be published after their deaths, allowed them to realize literary ambitions that were unfulfilled during their lifetime. The women also used the diary, which remains largely unpublished, to negotiate their art, desires, and frustrations, as well as their relationships with contemporary literary celebrities, including Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, and Walter Pater. Showing for the first time why Works and Days is a great experimental work of late-Victorian and early modernist writing, one that sheds startling new light on gender, sexuality, and authorship, Dever reveals how Bradley and Cooper wrote their shared life as art, and their art as life, on pages of intimacy that they wanted to share with the world.

The Diary of Michael Field

Chains of Love and Beauty

""Michael Field" was the pseudonym of two women writing as a male author: Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who were aunt and niece, and a devoted couple for three decades that spanned the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. While much has been written about the Fields' many volumes of poetry and plays, and about their strange and complicated life, this book is the first to focus on their diary, which they kept for twenty-five years and viewed as an "unpublished manuscript" called Works and Days. In this book, Dever argues that Works and Days represents one of the great experimental prose narratives of the transitional period between Victorian and modernist literature. Through the co-written diary, which fills twenty-nine volumes and about 9,500 pages, the women envisioned a life beyond the tight horizons of one home and one family, and portrayed new forms of women's intimacy at the dawn of the twentieth century. Dever focuses on five pivotal years in the life of Bradley and Cooper as reflected in the diary: the death of Cooper's mother; a year of personal and professional humiliation; the death of Cooper's father; the women's establishment of their home together; and the event they experience as a devastating loss, the death of their dog Whym Chow. In this examination of the Fields' most personal writing, Dever establishes their unlikely role as a bridge between the Victorians and the experiments of modernism to come"--

An exploration of the idealized figure of the dead mother in Victorian fiction and Freudian psychoanalysis.

Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins

Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud

In this major work, Carolyn Dever considers the ambivalence or outright hostility many feminists feel toward theory, arguing that a fundamental skepticism toward abstraction has been vital to the development of the movement. Dever analyzes the politics of feminist theory by looking at its popular, activist, and academic modes, from the liberation movements of the 1970s to gender and queer studies now. Using key moments in the history of modern feminism--consciousness-raising, best-selling books like Sexual Politics by Kate Millett and The Women's Room by Marilyn French, and media representations of women's struggle for equality--Dever outlines heated debates over psychoanalysis, sexuality, and activism. The abstract and the grounded converge in discussions about the relationship between the feminist mind and the feminist body and in the preoccupation, both uneasy and utopian, with lesbian sexuality. Powerful, illuminating, and galvanizing, Skeptical Feminism traces the strategies the women's movement has used to make theory matter--and points toward a new, politically engaged approach to feminist thought. A clarion call for a new approach to feminist thought.

Activist Theory, Activist Practice

Skeptical Feminism

Margaret Cohen

The Literary Channel defines a crucial transnational literary "zone" that shaped the development of the modern novel. During the first two centuries of the genre's history, Britain and France were locked in political, economic, and military struggle. The period also saw British and French writers, critics, and readers enthusiastically exchanging works, codes, and theories of the novel. Building on both nationally based literary history and comparatist work on poetics, this book rethinks the genre's evolution as marking the power and limits of modern cultural nationalism. In the Channel zone, the novel developed through interactions among texts, readers, writers, and translators that inextricably linked national literary cultures. It served as a forum to promote and critique nationalist clichés, whether from the standpoint of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, the insurgent nationalism of colonized spaces, or the non-nationalized culture of consumption. In the process, the Channel zone promoted codes that became the genre's hallmarks, including the sentimental poetics that would shape fiction through the nineteenth century. Uniting leading critics who bridge literary history and theory, The Literary Channel will appeal to all readers attentive to the future of literary studies, as well as those interested in the novel's development, British and French cultural history, and extra-national patterns of cultural exchange. Contributors include April Alliston, Emily Apter, Margaret Cohen, Joan DeJean, Carolyn Dever, Lynn Festa, Françoise Lionnet, Deidre Shauna Lynch, Sharon Marcus, Richard Maxwell, and Mary Helen McMurran.

Carolyn Dever

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