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Fashioning Michael Field: Michael Field and late-Victorian dress culture
This article explores how the late-Victorian poets Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote under the collaborative pseudonym Michael Field, used fashionable dress to construct and advertise their unique poetic identity. Using evidence from their journal Works and Days, I contextualise Bradley and Cooper's clothing in terms of late-Victorian dress culture, and the major dress reform movements of the nineteenth century. I demonstrate that Bradley and Cooper used fashion as a distinctively feminine way of participating in aesthetic culture, marking significant life events, and to advertise their poetic identity. This self-fashioning also exposed them to aesthetic scrutiny from their peers Oscar Wilde and Bernard Berenson. Finally, I argue that fashion played a crucial role in Bradley and Cooper's desire for one another – and that this desire can be understood in terms of erotic reciprocity.
History
School
- The Arts, English and Drama
Department
- English and Drama
Published in
Journal of Victorian CultureVolume
18Issue
3Pages
313 - 334Citation
PARKER, S., 2013. Fashioning Michael Field: Michael Field and Late-Victorian Dress Culture. Journal of Victorian Culture, 18 (3), pp.313-334.Publisher
© Taylor & FrancisVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2013Notes
This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: PARKER, S., 2013. Fashioning Michael Field: Michael Field and Late-Victorian Dress Culture. Journal of Victorian Culture, 18 (3), pp.313-334, which has been published in final form at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13555502.2013.783413. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.ISSN
1355-5502eISSN
1750-0133Publisher version
Language
- en