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- Title
Michael Field's Paratextual Poetics: Portraying a Protomodernist Sappho.
- Authors
Cantillo Lucuara, Mayron Estefan
- Abstract
This article offers an innovative perspective on Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper's Long Ago (1889), their Sapphic volume of verse published under the Michael Field pseudonym. Rather than propounding new interpretations of the lyrics in the collection, I focus on its paratextual apparatus -from the cover and the frontispiece to the endnotes or appendix-with the aim of unveiling a significant aspect that has been overlooked by most critics: the fact that, in its rich paratextuality, Long Ago presents an enigmatic conflation of word and image that seduces the reader, pre-establishes a clear interpretive framework, and activates an innovative dialogue with the past. This paratextual dialogue, I conclude, results in a protomodernist reworking of Sappho as a mystifying, unstable, and radically open (para)textual figure -one that is always ready to be made new.
- Subjects
LESBIANISM; ANONYMS &; pseudonyms; PARATEXT; POETICS
- Publication
Complutense Journal of English Studies, 2023, Vol 31, p1
- ISSN
2386-3935
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.5209/cjes.72361