The Ohio State University Press, 2008 eISBN: 978-0-8142-7893-2 | Cloth: 978-0-8142-1081-9 | Paper: 978-0-8142-5736-4 Library of Congress Classification PR878.W6L67 2008 Dewey Decimal Classification 823.0099287
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
The nineteenth century saw a marked rise both in the sheer numbers of women active in visual art professions and in the discursive concern for the woman artist in fiction, the periodical press, art history, and politics. The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature argues that Victorian women writers used the controversial figure of the woman painter to intervene in the discourse of aesthetics. These writers were able to assert their own status as artistic producers through the representation of female visual artists.
Women painters posed a threat to the traditional heterosexual erotic art scenarios—a male artist and a male viewer admiring a woman or feminized art object. Antonia Losano traces an actual movement in history in which women writers struggled to rewrite the relations of gender and art to make a space for female artistic production. She examines as well the disruption female artists caused in the socioeconomic sphere. Losano offers close readings of a wide array of Victorian writers, particularly those works classified as noncanonical—by Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Margaret Oliphant, Anne Brontë, and Mrs. Humphrey Ward—and a new look at better-known novels such as Jane Eyre and Daniel Deronda, focusing on the pivotal social and aesthetic meanings of female artistic production in these texts. Each of the novels considered here is viewed as a contained, coherent, and complex aesthetic treatise that coalesces around the figure of the female painter.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Antonia Losano is associate professor of English and American literatures at Middlebury College.
REVIEWS
“My chief criterion for calling a work of criticism ‘good’ is that it should change the way I think about texts I thought I already knew. In The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature, Antonia Losano has done just that, and I believe the book will do so for other readers of Victorian women’s fiction.” —Robyn Warhol, professor of English and Director of the Humanities Center at the University of Vermont
“The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature deftly explores the fraught material conditions surrounding Victorian female professionalism and aesthetic production.”
—Rachel Teukolsky, assistant professor of English, Pennsylvania State University
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Chapter 1 Prevailing Winds and Cross-Currents: Public Discourse
and the History of Victorian Women Painters
Chapter 2 Desire and Feminist Aesthetics in Anne Brontë¿s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Chapter 3 Ekphrasis and the Art of Courtship in Jane Eyre
Chapter 4 Making A Living: Howitt, Eliot, Oliphant
Chapter 5 The Afterlife of Angelica Kauffman
Chapter 6 Disfigurement and Beauty in Dinah Craik and Charlotte Yonge
Chapter 7 Painting the New Woman: Mary Ward and the Woman Artist
Coda: Contemporary Representations of the Woman Painter
Notes
Bibliography
Index
The Ohio State University Press, 2008 eISBN: 978-0-8142-7893-2 Cloth: 978-0-8142-1081-9 Paper: 978-0-8142-5736-4
The nineteenth century saw a marked rise both in the sheer numbers of women active in visual art professions and in the discursive concern for the woman artist in fiction, the periodical press, art history, and politics. The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature argues that Victorian women writers used the controversial figure of the woman painter to intervene in the discourse of aesthetics. These writers were able to assert their own status as artistic producers through the representation of female visual artists.
Women painters posed a threat to the traditional heterosexual erotic art scenarios—a male artist and a male viewer admiring a woman or feminized art object. Antonia Losano traces an actual movement in history in which women writers struggled to rewrite the relations of gender and art to make a space for female artistic production. She examines as well the disruption female artists caused in the socioeconomic sphere. Losano offers close readings of a wide array of Victorian writers, particularly those works classified as noncanonical—by Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Margaret Oliphant, Anne Brontë, and Mrs. Humphrey Ward—and a new look at better-known novels such as Jane Eyre and Daniel Deronda, focusing on the pivotal social and aesthetic meanings of female artistic production in these texts. Each of the novels considered here is viewed as a contained, coherent, and complex aesthetic treatise that coalesces around the figure of the female painter.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Antonia Losano is associate professor of English and American literatures at Middlebury College.
REVIEWS
“My chief criterion for calling a work of criticism ‘good’ is that it should change the way I think about texts I thought I already knew. In The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature, Antonia Losano has done just that, and I believe the book will do so for other readers of Victorian women’s fiction.” —Robyn Warhol, professor of English and Director of the Humanities Center at the University of Vermont
“The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature deftly explores the fraught material conditions surrounding Victorian female professionalism and aesthetic production.”
—Rachel Teukolsky, assistant professor of English, Pennsylvania State University
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Chapter 1 Prevailing Winds and Cross-Currents: Public Discourse
and the History of Victorian Women Painters
Chapter 2 Desire and Feminist Aesthetics in Anne Brontë¿s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Chapter 3 Ekphrasis and the Art of Courtship in Jane Eyre
Chapter 4 Making A Living: Howitt, Eliot, Oliphant
Chapter 5 The Afterlife of Angelica Kauffman
Chapter 6 Disfigurement and Beauty in Dinah Craik and Charlotte Yonge
Chapter 7 Painting the New Woman: Mary Ward and the Woman Artist
Coda: Contemporary Representations of the Woman Painter
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC