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 addition to providing a helpful orientation to key literary-historical periods, critical concepts, theoretical debates and literary genres, this Companion considers the work of such well-known authors as Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Alison Bechdel and Sarah Waters. Written by a host of leading critics and covering subjects as diverse as lesbian desire in the long eighteenth century and same-sex love in a postcolonial context, this Companion 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.