Women Art Critics in Nineteenth-Century France Vanishing Acts [Hardcover]

This book is the first sustained study of a corpus of writings by women art critics active in nineteenth-century France that have all but vanished from the historical record. Written by scholars in art history and in literature, the essays employ a variety of interdisciplinary approaches and methodologies to study the womens reception of specific artworks and aesthetic movements in the nineteenth century, the intersections of aesthetics and politics in their essays, and their rhetorical strategies and literary styles.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 womens 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 l£=