Pen Vs. Paintbrush
Subtitle: Girodet, Balzac, and the Myth of Pygmalion in Post-Revolutionary France
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; Palgrave
Published: June 23, 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 336
ISBN-13: 9780312236410
Subjects: History of art & design styles: c 1800 to c 1900; Literary studies: 16th to 18th centuries; Literary studies: 19th century; Art & Art Instruction; French; Literary Criticism; European; Literary Criticism & Collections / French; European - French; General; 19th century; Art; Arts, French; Pygmalion (Greek mythology); Pygmalion (Greek mythology) in; Pygmalion (Greek mythology) in literature
First sentence: As an allegory of artistic creation, Pygmalion's myriad reworkings reflect the aesthetic and political particulars of the specific historical moment; in the works of Girodet and Balzac, the upheavals of Revolution and its aftermath shaped both the production and consumption of the myth.
Description: "Pen vs. Paintbrush explores the sibling rivalry between the sister arts from 1789 to 1830, focusing on the anxieties of aesthetics, artistic selfhood, and masculinity as they were brought forth in a competition between painters and authors for ascendancy during a period when definitions of gender and genre had been radically destabilized.

The competition for aesthetic hegemony, prompted by the uncertainties of artistic production in postrevolutionary France, further reflected a crisis in gender and artists' response to the threatening spectre of female subjecthood. The works of Anne-Louis Girodet and Honore de Balzac manifest this twofold rivalry of gender and genre in their compulsive reworkings of the myth of Pygmalion. Pen vs.

Paintbrush documents the ways in which this emblematic pair of artists responded to and represented the anxieties of artistic production, identity, and gender that confronted an entire generation."--BOOK JACKET.