Michael Field’s "Long ago" (1889) as a paradigm of intertextual theory: from strangeness to metaxology

Abstract

In this essay, I seek to tackle the question of how Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper articulate their intimate dialogue with Sappho’s poetry in their first volume of poetry, Long Ago (1889), published under the pseudonym of Michael Field. My response to this question translates into a thoroughgoing reflection that interprets Long Ago as a dense and audacious text in which the very ontology of art is revised and recast into ambivalent and open relations. The primary conclusion I reach is that the volume constitutes a paradigm of intertextual theory in use that opens up complex, unstable and fertile encounters between the English self and the Greek other, the translatable and the sublime, the mimetic and the original, the empathetic and the distant, the reparative and the fragmentary, the anti-type and the type, or the immanent and the transtextual.

Keywords

• long ago
• michael field
• sappho
• intertext
• rewriting