Aesthetics and Gender in American Literature: Portraits of the Woman ArtistThis study demonstrates how popular women writers used the female visual artist as their alter ego to renegotiate the boundaries between high and low culture. The figure of the professional woman painter allowed women writers to critique the dominant aesthetic and scientific theories that categorized women and an ethnically configured lower class as artistically and intellectually inferior to an elite, male-defined figure of the Romantic artist-as-genius. Illustrated. |
Contents
| 27 | |
| 39 | |
The Riddle of the Sphinx Elizabeth Stuart Phelpss The Story of Avis | 64 |
Louisa May Alcotts Women Artists Proving Avis in the Wrong | 94 |
Kate Chopins Awakening of Female Artistry | 120 |
Edith Whartons Portrait of a Lady in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction | 142 |
Authenticating the AfricanAmerican Female Artist Frances Harpers lola Leroy and Jessie Fausets Plum Bun | 162 |
Notes | 199 |
| 239 | |
| 255 | |
Other editions - View all
Aesthetics and Gender in American Literature: Portraits of the Woman Artist Deborah Barker No preview available - 2000 |
Common terms and phrases
ability Adèle aesthetic African-American Angela audience Avis's Awakening beauty Cassatt century Chopin color copyist Couture create critics critique depiction desire Diana and Persis domestic E. D. E. N. Southworth Edith Wharton Edna Edna's elite Elizabeth Stuart Elizabeth Stuart Phelps explains Fauset female artist feminine feminist Fern's fiction flâneur Fourteenth Street gaze gender Gertrude Harlem Renaissance Harper Hawthorne Hawthorne's heroine Hilda House of Mirth Ibid Indiana University Press intellectual Iola Kate Chopin Künstlerroman lady Lily Lily's literary literature Louisa May Alcott Madonna male Marble Faun masculine mass mechanical reproduction middle-class Miriam mother motherhood narrative nature Negro nineteenth nineteenth-century Noémie novel painting Percy Percy's Phelps Phelps's Philip picture Plum Bun portrait race racial uplift realistic relationship role Romantic scene sentimental sexual social Sphinx Story of Avis sublime tableaux vivants Theodora theories tion tradition vision visual Vivia Wharton woman artist woman painter women writers York
Popular passages
Page 36 - She saw no, not saw, but felt through and through a picture; she bestowed upon it all the warmth and richness of a woman's sympathy; not by any intellectual effort, but by this strength of heart, and this guiding light of sympathy, she went straight to the central point, in which the master had conceived his work.