Aesthetics and gender in American literature
Subtitle: portraits of the woman artist
By: Deborah Barker.
Publisher: Bucknell University Press; Associated University Presses
Published: 2000
Place of publication: Lewisberg [Pa.]; London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 258
Subjects: American fiction -- Women authors -- History and criticism.; Women and literature -- United States.; Art and literature -- United States.; Women artists in literature.; Sex role in literature.; Aesthetics, American.
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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 239-253) and index.