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MAKING THE “AMERICA OF ART”: CULTURAL NATIONALISM & 19TH-CENTURY WOMEN WRITERS
The Ohio State University Press, 2005 eISBN: 978-0-8142-7916-8 | Paper: 978-0-8142-5754-8 | Cloth: 978-0-8142-0983-7 Library of Congress Classification PS151.S67 2005 Dewey Decimal Classification 810.992870934
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
By the end of the 19th century it had become possible for American women to identify themselves as serious Artists. This was a relatively new phenomenon, one that became possible only after American women writers had dismantled the conceptual frameworks that had authorized their artistic production since the early days of the Republic. Making the “America of Art” demonstrates that beginning in the 1850s, women writers challenged the terms of the Scottish Common Sense philosophy, which had made artistic endeavors acceptable in the new Republic by subordinating aesthetic motivation to moral and educational goals. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Augusta Jane Evans drew on Ruskin to argue for the creation of a religiously based national aesthetic. In the postbellum years Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Constance Fenimore Woolson continued the process in a series of writings that revolved around three central areas of concern: the place of the popular in the realm of high art; the role of the genius; and the legacy of the Civil War. Sofer significantly revises the history of 19th-century American women’s authorship by detailing the gradual process that produced women writers wholly identified with literary high culture at the century’s end. Sofer argues that, counter to conventional wisdom, American women writers produced a large body of theoretical writing on the central aesthetic questions of the day. Although the writers Sofer studies were finally unable to construct viable new models for women’s artistic production, their attempts to do so are an essential piece of American literary history. See other books on: AMERICA | MAKING | Nationalism and literature | Women and literature | Women Authors See other titles from The Ohio State University Press |
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Nearby on shelf for American literature / Women authors:
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MAKING THE “AMERICA OF ART”: CULTURAL NATIONALISM & 19TH-CENTURY WOMEN WRITERS
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
The Ohio State University Press, 2005
eISBN: 978-0-8142-7916-8
Paper: 978-0-8142-5754-8
Cloth: 978-0-8142-0983-7
eISBN: 978-0-8142-7916-8
Paper: 978-0-8142-5754-8
Cloth: 978-0-8142-0983-7
By the end of the 19th century it had become possible for American women to identify themselves as serious Artists. This was a relatively new phenomenon, one that became possible only after American women writers had dismantled the conceptual frameworks that had authorized their artistic production since the early days of the Republic.
Making the “America of Art” demonstrates that beginning in the 1850s, women writers challenged the terms of the Scottish Common Sense philosophy, which had made artistic endeavors acceptable in the new Republic by subordinating aesthetic motivation to moral and educational goals. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Augusta Jane Evans drew on Ruskin to argue for the creation of a religiously based national aesthetic. In the postbellum years Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Constance Fenimore Woolson continued the process in a series of writings that revolved around three central areas of concern: the place of the popular in the realm of high art; the role of the genius; and the legacy of the Civil War.
Sofer significantly revises the history of 19th-century American women’s authorship by detailing the gradual process that produced women writers wholly identified with literary high culture at the century’s end. Sofer argues that, counter to conventional wisdom, American women writers produced a large body of theoretical writing on the central aesthetic questions of the day. Although the writers Sofer studies were finally unable to construct viable new models for women’s artistic production, their attempts to do so are an essential piece of American literary history.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
