"In Aesthetics and Gender in American Literature: Portraits of the Woman Artist, Barker demonstrates how popular woman writers - Fanny Fern, E. D. E. N. Southworth, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Jessie Fauset - used the female visual artist as their artistic alter ego to renegotiate the boundaries between high and low culture.". "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.

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