Making the "America of Art": Cultural Nationalism and Nineteenth-century Women Writers

Front Cover
Ohio State University Press, 2005 - Literary Criticism - 286 pages

By the end of the 19th century it had become possible for American women to identify themselves as serious Artists. This was a relatively new phenomenon, one that became possible only after American women writers had dismantled the conceptual frameworks that had authorized their artistic production since the early days of the Republic.

Making the "America of Art" demonstrates that beginning in the 1850s, women writers challenged the terms of the Scottish Common Sense philosophy, which had made artistic endeavors acceptable in the new Republic by subordinating aesthetic motivation to moral and educational goals. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Augusta Jane Evans drew on Ruskin to argue for the creation of a religiously based national aesthetic. In the postbellum years Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Constance Fenimore Woolson continued the process in a series of writings that revolved around three central areas of concern: the place of the popular in the realm of high art; the role of the genius; and the legacy of the Civil War.

Sofer significantly revises the history of 19th-century American women's authorship by detailing the gradual process that produced women writers wholly identified with literary high culture at the century's end. Sofer argues that, counter to conventional wisdom, American women writers produced a large body of theoretical writing on the central aesthetic questions of the day. Although the writers Sofer studies were finally unable to construct viable new models for women's artistic production, their attempts to do so are an essential piece of American literary history.

 

Contents

Harriet Beecher Stowes New School of Protestant Art
19
Augusta Jane Evans and Southern Art
65
Exorcising the Popular Woman Writer from
105
Genius Gender and the Problem of Mentorship
139
The Civil War and the Making of the America of Art
178
Notes
225
Bibliography
273
Index
282
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2005)

Naomi Z. Sofer is an independent scholar.