Aesthetics and Gender in American Literature: Portraits of the Woman Artist"In Aesthetics and Gender in American Literature: Portraits of the Woman Artist, Barker demonstrates how popular woman writers - Fanny Fern, E. D. E. N. Southworth, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Jessie Fauset - used the female visual artist as their artistic alter ego to renegotiate the boundaries between high and low culture." "In their challenge to a gendered, racialized evolutionary aesthetics as embodied in the female copyist as an icon of cultural reproduction, these women writers enact in a fictional format what many recent feminists address at the theoretical level: a resistance to essentialist definitions of women's nature and to "universal" standards of high culture."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved |
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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 Adele aesthetic African-American American Angela audience Austin Phelps 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 Phelps explains eyes Fauset female artist feminine feminist Fern and Southworth Fern's fiction Fourteenth Street gaze gender Gertrude Harlem Renaissance Harper Hawthorne Hawthorne's heroine high culture Hilda House of Mirth Ibid intellectual lady Lily Lily's literary literature Louisa May Alcott Madonna male Marble Faun Mary Cassatt masculine mass mechanical reproduction middle-class Miriam mother motherhood narrative nature Negro nineteenth-century 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 University Press 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.