A history of European women's professional activities and organizational roles between 1789 and 1914.

Women, fashion, consumption, luxury, and education are the main subjects of our researchers. The contributors of this volume accompanied women and objects in their travels across Modern Europe and offered thorough and diverse analyses connecting the circulation of people with the circulation of ideas. Making use of archive materials, visual sources and museum collections, the authors point out the richness of the region and the role of women in promoting new ideas of modernity. This will help the public to better know and understand the importance of women's sociability in building new nations and constructing new identities in South-Eastern Europe and beyond.

Over the past years, studies have begun not only to identify the factors that impeded the full participation of women artists in French cultural life, such as women’s limited access to professional art education, but also to bring to light the considerable artistic accomplishments of women occluded by historians for over a century. A similar effort at historical revision has been under way for French women writers. Works of fiction that enjoyed many editions in the nineteenth-century receded from our field of vision for almost a century before being rediscovered and reissued during the last decades of the twentieth century. Such efforts have resulted in scholarship that has helped revise the history of both artistic and literary expression in nineteenth-century France. Similarly, many women in nineteenth-century France had their art criticism published both in journal reviews and in book form, often for decades, in a number of the most influential venues of their day. However, it is perplexing that they remain almost totally invisible in histories of French culture. Women Art Critics in Nineteenth-Century France: Vanishing Acts is the first sustained effort to bring these prolific and influential critics out from the shadows. Although each of the chapters in this volume results from an interdisciplinary approach, the fact that they are written by scholars in art history and in literature means that there will be inevitable differences in approach and methodology. Thus, we study the women’s reception of specific artworks and aesthetic movements, discuss intersections of aesthetics and politics in their essays and the literary styles and rhetorical strategies of individual critics, explore the social conditions that allowed or impeded their successes, and suggest reasons for their all but disappearance in the twentieth century. In bringing to light for twenty-first-century readers the “vanished” writings of heretofore unrecognized or underrecognized women art critics, the authors hope to contribute to the ongoing revision of women’s role in cultural history. The multifaceted approaches to word/image studies modeled in this book, and the many avenues for further research it identifies, will inspire scholars in a number of disciplines to continue the work of reinscribing women in the history of cultural life.

This survey explores the history of nineteenth-century European art and visual culture. Focusing primarily on painting and sculpture, it places these two art forms within the larger context of visual culture including photography, graphic design, architecture, and decorative arts. In turn, all are treated within a broad historical framework to show the connections between visual cultural production and the political, social, and economic order of the time. Topics covered include The Classical Paradigm, Art and Revolutionary Propaganda In France, The Arts under Napoleon and Francisco Goya and Spanish Art at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century. For art enthusiasts, or anyone who wants to learn more about Art History.

The nineteenth century, a time of far-reaching cultural, political, and socio-economic transformation in Europe, brought about fundamental changes in the role of women. Women achieved this by fighting for their rights in the legal, economic, and political spheres. In the various parts of Europe, this process went forward at a different pace and followed different patterns. Most historical research up to now has ignored this diversity, preferring to focus on women’s emancipation movements in major western European countries such as Britain and France. The present volume provides a broader context to the movement by including countries both large and small from all regions of Europe. Fourteen historians, all of them specialists in women’s history, examine the origins and development of women’s emancipation movements in their respective areas of expertise. By exploring the cultural and political diversity of nineteenth-century Europe and at the same time pointing out connections to questions explored by conventional scholarship, the essays shed new light on common developments and problems.