The crownless A. Mary F. Robinson

This essay is an imaginary portrait of A. Mary F. Robinson from the perspective of Walter Pater

Cosmopolitan disturbances: Amy Levy in Dresden

This article explores the two ways in which Amy Levy experienced the cosmopolitan in Dresden, one as a form of aesthetic liberation, the other as oppressive, particularly in the context of the rise of antisemitism in Germany

Animating sight and song: a meditation on identity, fair use, and collaboration

In producing an online ‘edition’ of Michael Field’s poem ‘Antonello da Messina’s Saint Sebastian’ from their 1892 collection of poetic ‘translations’ of paintings, Sight and Song, this project aims to suggest how digital tools might enable us to ‘edit’ and present literature in new ways — ways that, in this case, are meant to gesture not just at the process of composition, but also at the extent to which the poetic effects achieved depend on optical, spatial, and kinaesthetic metaphors of transparency and opacity. The project is also meant as a reflection on the terms upon which we encounter nineteenth-century authors and texts on the Web, whether in official electronic archives or the kinds of personal and crowd-curated digital collections being assembled on online mass platforms like Tumblr, Pinterest, and Flickr

In the cloud: Nineteenth-Century visions and experiments for the digital age

What shapes does the nineteenth-century paper archive take in the twenty-first century digital cloud? Luisa Calè and Ana Parejo Vadillo situate the crafts, experiments, and visions discussed in this anniversary issue in the wider context of questions raised by the emergence and possibilities of nineteenth-century archives for the digital era. What happens when objects float free of their bibliographic and museum anchorings? What is gained and lost in the digital transformations? What new imaginary spaces open up in the transition from the book to the virtual codex and from the terrestrial library to cloud-sourced collections? What formations does the nineteenth century take in digital discourse networks? How are nineteenth-century objects made digital, and through what crafts, skills, and disciplines? How are they shaped by circulation through digital platforms, social media, and remix on the semantic web? What kinds of authoring, what structures of labour, what kinds of making and knowing shape agency in the nineteenth-century digital archive

Michael Field, Pre-Raphaelite poet: one play and two fair beginnings

On Michael Field as a Pre-Raphaelite Poet. Discusses their poetic drama, Fair Rosamund

Symbolism at war: Charles Ricketts and the politics of the stage

This essay considers the effect of World War I on Charles Ricketts’ work for the stage as an avant-garde set and costume designer. It looks at his cosmopolitan designs in the context of European symbolism. The first part of the essay focuses on Ricketts’ symbolist manifesto ‘The Art of Stage Decoration’ (1913). The essay then examines his designs for three Shakespearean plays that toured Le Havre in 1918 to entertain the troops. I argue that, in the aftermath of the war, Rickett’s symbolism became the lens through which he assessed the complex political landscape of the 1920s. I suggest that his stance against realism politicised his practice and explains his interest in Mussolini’s fascism

‘The hot-house of decadent chronicle’: Michael Field and the dance of modern verse-drama

This article examines Michael Field's avant-guard poetic dramas post 1895, in particular the Roman Trilogy (The World at Auction, The Race of Leaves, and Julia Domna), to suggest they should be read for their extraordinary poetic experimentation, which precedes, prefigures and is at the heart of modernism's innovations in the genre. It argues that influenced by the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, particularly The Birth of Tragedy, Michael Field turned to Latin decadence and to contemporary German philology to re-energise the genre. The essay also suggests that the Trilogy's emphasis on dance foreshadows the impact of Ballet Russes on modern aesthetics

Aestheticism and Decoration: At Home with Michael Field

Talia Schaffer’s work on the poet Rosamund Marriott Watson and her theories of home decoration has been key to understand how female aesthetes reconfigured and re-appropriated this aspect of aestheticism. Looking at the aesthetic writings of Marriott Watson’s The Art of the House, Schaffer has shown how she forged a new, complex version of aestheticism by both aligning herself with male aesthetes in their critique of women’s arts and crafts tradition and distancing herself from male aestheticism by re-articulating an aesthetic of the home embedded in feminine décor.But how did female aesthetes inhabit and live that aestheticism We know nothing of how Watson’s theories informed her own life as an aesthete. For this reason the case of Michael Field is particularly important. Michael Field never wrote on home decoration, but an examination of Bradley and Cooper’s diaries, letters and photographs reveal their unique approach to the house beautiful movement. As they put it in their diary, Works and Days: “To-day’s dreams & desires—the tongs with wh. the angel makes living coals of our lips to-day—these are the things to be expressed in our walls, in our furniture, in our dress.” This expressive, living aestheticism is at the core of this essay

Aestheticism and Decoration: At Home with Michael Field

Talia Schaffer’s work on the poet Rosamund Marriott Watson and her theories of home decoration has been key to understand how female aesthetes reconfigured and re-appropriated this aspect of aestheticism. Looking at the aesthetic writings of Marriott Watson’s The Art of the House, Schaffer has shown how she forged a new, complex version of aestheticism by both aligning herself with male aesthetes in their critique of women’s arts and crafts tradition and distancing herself from male aestheticism by re-articulating an aesthetic of the home embedded in feminine décor.But how did female aesthetes inhabit and live that aestheticism We know nothing of how Watson’s theories informed her own life as an aesthete. For this reason the case of Michael Field is particularly important. Michael Field never wrote on home decoration, but an examination of Bradley and Cooper’s diaries, letters and photographs reveal their unique approach to the house beautiful movement. As they put it in their diary, Works and Days: “To-day’s dreams & desires—the tongs with wh. the angel makes living coals of our lips to-day—these are the things to be expressed in our walls, in our furniture, in our dress.” This expressive, living aestheticism is at the core of this essay

'Poets of style: cultivating artifice in poetries of asceticism and excess

Beginning with Christina Rossetti, this chapter traces the ways in which decadent women poets styled their poetics through artifice. If the poetry of the period is traditionally framed within the discourses of the sensual and phenomenological, this chapter also suggests that formal experimentation was an attempt at generating questions about the independence of art, an issue particularly important for women, who saw in the notion of art for art’s sake a form of social and political revolution. The chapter distinguishes two main poetic responses to the linguistic challenges of the fin-de-siècle period, both produced by the obsession with language’s materiality that was at the heart of decadence: the first is an ascetic style based on disciplining the word; the second an aesthetics of excess, bathed in historicism and characteristically animated by luxurious language. To illustrate these two responses, the chapter discusses the ascetic lyric poetry of Alice Meynell, and the poetics of excess of the verse dramas of Michael Field