Articles liés à Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts

9780817355524: Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts
Couverture souple
ISBN 10 : 0817355529 ISBN 13 : 9780817355524
Editeur : The University of Alabama Press, 2009

Synopsis

An insightful look at representations of women's bodies and female authority.

This work explores Edith Wharton's career-long concern with a 19th-century visual culture that limited female artistic agency and expression. Wharton repeatedly invoked the visual arts--especially painting—as a medium for revealing the ways that women's bodies have been represented (as passive, sexualized, infantalized, sickly, dead). Well-versed in the Italian masters, Wharton made special use of the art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, particularly its penchant for producing not portraits of individual women but instead icons onto whose bodies male desire is superimposed.

Emily Orlando contends that while Wharton's early work presents women enshrined by men through art, the middle and later fiction shifts the seat of power to women. From Lily Bart in The House of Mirth to Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country and Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence, women evolve from victims to vital agents, securing for themselves a more empowering and satisfying relationship to art and to their own identities.

Orlando also studies the lesser-known short stories and novels, revealing Wharton's re-workings of texts by Browning, Poe, Balzac, George Eliot, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and, most significantly, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts is the first extended study to examine the presence in Wharton's fiction of the Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting of Rossetti and his muses, notably Elizabeth Siddall and Jane Morris. Wharton emerges as one of American literature's most gifted inter-textual realists, providing a vivid lens through which to view issues of power, resistance, and social change as they surface in American literature and culture.

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À propos de l'auteur

Emily J. Orlando is Assistant Professor of American Literature at Tennessee State University.

Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.

Éditeur
The University of Alabama Press
Date d'édition
2009
Langue
anglais
ISBN 10 
0817355529
ISBN 13 
9780817355524
Reliure
Broché
Nombre de pages
264
Coordonnées du fabricant
non disponible
Personne responsable
non disponible