Aesthetics and gender in American literature

Description:

"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.

subjects: Art and literature,  American Aesthetics,  History and criticism,  Sex role in literature,  Women authors,  Women artists in literature,  Women and literature,  American fiction,  Aesthetics, American,  Gender identity in literature,  American literature, history and criticism,  Women in literature

Places: United States