Aesthetics and Gender in American Literature: Portraits of the Woman Artist

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Bucknell University Press, 2000 - Drama - 258 pages
This 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.

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Contents

Cultural Reproduction and the Female Copyist
27
Domesticating the Sublime Fanny Fern and E D E N Southworth
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
Bibliography
239
Index
255
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Page 136 - Standing on the bare ground — my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.
Page 139 - AND there appeared a great wonder in heaven ; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars : and she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.
Page 139 - And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron : and her child was caught up unto God, and to his throne.
Page 203 - Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977...
Page 137 - Nor can it be doubted that this moral sentiment which thus scents the air, and grows in the grain, and impregnates the waters of the world, is caught by man and sinks into his soul. The moral influence of nature upon every individual is that amount of truth which it illustrates to him.
Page 137 - The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude.
Page 157 - The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the general anglo-saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big blatant Bayadere of Journalism, of the newspaper and the picture (above all) magazine; who keeps screaming "Look at me, I am the thing, and I only, the thing that will keep you in relation with me all the time without your having to attend one minute of the time.
Page 100 - ... solar seeds of the sphere," "dishes from Plutarch's chaste table," and other viands equally hard to find in any modern market. Reform conventions of all sorts were haunted by these brethren, who said many wise things and did many foolish ones. Unfortunately, these wanderings interfered with their harvest at home; but the rule was to do what the spirit moved, so they left their crops to Providence and went a-reaping in wider and, let us hope, more fruitful fields than their own. Luckily, the earthly...
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.

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