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Over the course of the nineteenth century, women in Britain
participated in diverse and prolific forms of artistic labour. As
they created objects and commodities that blurred the boundaries
between domestic and fine art production, they crafted
subjectivities for themselves as creative workers. By bringing
together work by scholars of literature, painting, music, craft and
the plastic arts, this collection argues that the constructed and
contested nature of the female artistic professional was a notable
aspect of debates about aesthetic value and the impact of
industrial technologies. All the essays in this volume set up a
productive inter-art dialogue that complicates conventional binary
divisions such as amateur and professional, public and private,
artistry and industry in order to provide a more nuanced
understanding of the relationship between gender, artistic labour
and creativity in the period. Ultimately, how women faced the
pragmatics of their own creative labour as they pursued vocations,
trades and professions in the literary marketplace and related
art-industries reveals the different ideological positions
surrounding the transition of women from industrious amateurism to
professional artistry.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, women in Britain
participated in diverse and prolific forms of artistic labour. As
they created objects and commodities that blurred the boundaries
between domestic and fine art production, they crafted
subjectivities for themselves as creative workers. By bringing
together work by scholars of literature, painting, music, craft and
the plastic arts, this collection argues that the constructed and
contested nature of the female artistic professional was a notable
aspect of debates about aesthetic value and the impact of
industrial technologies. All the essays in this volume set up a
productive inter-art dialogue that complicates conventional binary
divisions such as amateur and professional, public and private,
artistry and industry in order to provide a more nuanced
understanding of the relationship between gender, artistic labour
and creativity in the period. Ultimately, how women faced the
pragmatics of their own creative labour as they pursued vocations,
trades and professions in the literary marketplace and related
art-industries reveals the different ideological positions
surrounding the transition of women from industrious amateurism to
professional artistry.
Patricia Zakreski's interdisciplinary study draws on fiction,
prose, painting, and the periodical press to expand and redefine
our understanding of women's relationship to paid work during the
Victorian period. While the idea of 'separate spheres' has largely
gone uncontested by feminist critics studying female labour during
the nineteenth century, Zakreski challenges this distinction by
showing that the divisions between public and private were, in
fact, surprisingly flexible, with homes described as workplaces and
workplaces as homes. By combining art with forms of industrial or
mass production in representations of the respectable woman worker,
writers projected a form of paid creative work that was not
violated or profaned by the public world of the market in which it
was traded. Looking specifically at sewing, art, writing, and
acting, Zakreski shows how these professions increasingly came to
be defined as 'artistic' and thus as suitable professions for
middle-class women, and argues that the supposedly degrading
activity of paid work could be transformed into a refining
experience for women. Rather than consigning working women to the
margins of patriarchal culture, then, her study shows how
representations of creative women, by authors such as Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, Dinah Craik, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope,
and Charlotte Yonge, participated in and shaped new forms of
mainstream culture.
Patricia Zakreski's interdisciplinary study draws on fiction,
prose, painting, and the periodical press to expand and redefine
our understanding of women's relationship to paid work during the
Victorian period. While the idea of 'separate spheres' has largely
gone uncontested by feminist critics studying female labour during
the nineteenth century, Zakreski challenges this distinction by
showing that the divisions between public and private were, in
fact, surprisingly flexible, with homes described as workplaces and
workplaces as homes. By combining art with forms of industrial or
mass production in representations of the respectable woman worker,
writers projected a form of paid creative work that was not
violated or profaned by the public world of the market in which it
was traded. Looking specifically at sewing, art, writing, and
acting, Zakreski shows how these professions increasingly came to
be defined as 'artistic' and thus as suitable professions for
middle-class women, and argues that the supposedly degrading
activity of paid work could be transformed into a refining
experience for women. Rather than consigning working women to the
margins of patriarchal culture, then, her study shows how
representations of creative women, by authors such as Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, Dinah Craik, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope,
and Charlotte Yonge, participated in and shaped new forms of
mainstream culture.
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