In this study, Huf analyzes six novels by American women for insight into the woman artist's enduring conflict. The novels included are Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' The Story of Avis, Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark, Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar.

"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.

In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artist novels, American women writers challenge cultural, social, and legal systems that attempt to limit or diminish women’s embodied capabilities outside of the domestic. Women writers such as E.D.E.N. Southworth, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Jessie Fauset, and Zelda Fitzgerald use the artist novel to highlight the structural and material limitations that women artists face when attempting to achieve critical success while navigating inequitable marriages and social codes that restrict women’s mobility, education, and pursuit of vocation. These artist-rebel protagonists find that their very bodies demand an outlet to articulate desires that defy patriarchal rhetoric, and this demand becomes an artistic drive to express an embodied knowledge through artistic invention. Ultimately, these women writers empower their heroines to move beyond prescribed patriarchal identities in order to achieve autonomous subjectivity through their artistic development, challenging stereotypes surrounding gender, race, and ability and beginning to reshape cultural notions of marriage, motherhood, and artistry at the turn of the twentieth century.

"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.

Weeds renders in decidedly feminist terms the harsh life of tobacco sharecroppers in Kentucky in the early 20th century.

Alexis de Tocqueville asserted that America had no truly great literature, and that American writers merely mimicked the British and European traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This new edited collection masterfully refutes Tocqueville's monocultural myopia and reveals the distinctive role American poetry and prose have played in reflecting and passing judgment upon the core values of American democracy. The essays, profiling the work of Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Updike, Edith Wharton, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Willa Cather, Walker Percy, and Tom Wolfe, reveal how America's greatest writers have acted as society's most ardent cheerleaders and its most penetrating critics. Christine Dunn Henderson's exciting new work offers literature as a portal through which to view the philosophical principles that animate America's political order and the mores which either reinforce or undermine them.