Writing the Woman Artist : Essays on Poetics, Politics, and Portraiture

__Writing the Woman Artist__ is a collection of essays that explore the ways women writers portray women painters, sculptors, writers, and performers. __Writing the Woman Artist__ is a collection of essays that explore the ways women writers portray women painters, sculptors, writers, and performers. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Part I. Deconstructing the Fathers' Tradition 1. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: H.D.'s Rescriptions of Joyce, Lawrence, and Pound 2. Power and Poetic Vocation in Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language 3. Lyric Voice and Sexual Difference in Elizabeth Bishop Part II. Thinking Back Through Our Mothers 4. The Pattern of Birds and Beasts: Willa Cather and Women's Art 5. Anita Brookner: Woman Writer as Reluctant Feminist 6. Incomplete Stories: Womanhood and Artistic Ambition in Daniel Deronda and Between the Acts Part III. Confronting the Dilemma of Role and Vocation 7. When Privilege Is No Protection: The Woman Artist in Quicksand and The House of Mirth 8. The Artist Manque in the Fiction of Rebecca Harding Davis 9. From Shadow to Substance: The Empowerment of the Artist Figure in Lee Smith's Fiction 10. Through the Flower: Judy Chicago's Conflict Between a Woman-Centered Vision and the Male Artist Hero 11. The Alberta Trilogy: Cora Sandel's Norwegian Künstlerroman and American Feminist Literary Discourse 12. The Hysteric and the Mimic: Reading Christa Wolf's The Quest for Christa Τ. Part IV. Rethinking the Politics of Art 13. "Sisters in Arms": The Warrior Construct in Writings by Contemporary U.S. Women of Color 14. The Politics of the Woman Artist in Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits 15. Margaret Drabble's The Waterfall·. New System, New Morality 16. "Retreat with Honour": Mary Cholmondeley's Presentation of the New Woman Artist in Red Pottage Part V. Reconceiving Feminist Aesthetics 17. Aurora Leigh: An Epical Ars Poetica 18. “I must not settle into a figure”: The Woman Artist in Virginia Woolf's Writings 19. Re-visioning Creativity: Audre Lorde's Refiguration of Eros as the Black Mother Within Selected Bibliography Contributors Index

"I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill."—Virginia Woolf, Professions for Women

Writing The Woman Artist is a collection of essays that explores the ways in which women writers portray women painters, sculptors, writers, and performers. Surveying the works of a variety of women writers—from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from different ethnic, national , racial, and economic backgrounds—this book treats their revisions of the Künstlerroman and their perceptions of the relationships between muse, artist, and audience in other genres. Suzanne W. ]ones and her collaborators seek to understand how representations of women artists and their poetics and politics are mediated by social and historical factors, including literary movements and theories of language. In doing so, they make an important contribution to the field of feminist scholarship, and generate new ways of understanding how the dynamics of creativity intersect with the dynamics of gender.

Contributors to the volume are Ann Ardis, Alison Booth , Kathleen Brogan, Lynda Bundtzen, Pamela Caughie, Mary DeShazer, Linda Dittmar, Josephine Donovan, Susan Stanford Friedman , Gayle Greene, Linda Hunt, Katherine Kearns, Holly Laird, Estella Lauter, Z. Nelly Martinez, Jane Atteridge Rose, Margaret Diane Stetz, Renate Voris, and Mara Witzling.

Writing The Woman Artist is a valuable new resource for scholars and students working in the fields of European and American literature and women's studies.

"I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill."—Virginia Woolf, Professions for Women Writing The Woman Artist is a collection of essays that explores the ways in which women writers portray women painters, sculptors, writers, and performers. Surveying the works of a variety of women writers—from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from different ethnic, national , racial, and economic backgrounds—this book treats their revisions of the Künstlerroman and their perceptions of the relationships between muse, artist, and audience in other genres. Suzanne W. ]ones and her collaborators seek to understand how representations of women artists and their poetics and politics are mediated by social and historical factors, including literary movements and theories of language. In doing so, they make an important contribution to the field of feminist scholarship, and generate new ways of understanding how the dynamics of creativity intersect with the dynamics of gender. Contributors to the volume are Ann Ardis, Alison Booth , Kathleen Brogan, Lynda Bundtzen, Pamela Caughie, Mary DeShazer, Linda Dittmar, Josephine Donovan, Susan Stanford Friedman , Gayle Greene, Linda Hunt, Katherine Kearns, Holly Laird, Estella Lauter, Z. Nelly Martinez, Jane Atteridge Rose, Margaret Diane Stetz, Renate Voris, and Mara Witzling. Writing The Woman Artist is a valuable new resource for scholars and students working in the fields of European and American literature and women's studies.