Women Writing the American Artist in Novels of Development from 1850–1932: The Artist Embodied

The Artist Embodied: Female Creativity and Development in American Literature from 1850-1940

My poster will provide an overview of my monograph coming out with Lexington
Books in 2021. My project explores the development of the female artist in
American literature by women writers, including the work of E.D.E.N Southworth,
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Willa Cather, Jessie Fauset, and Zelda Fitzgerald. I examine
how depictions of the female artist depart from the romantic concept of the artist
and merge with the “cult of domesticity” to produce a new communal sense of
artistry that is implicitly linked to the female body. By tracing tropes of race and
disability in Künstlerromane, I argue that women writers contest patriarchal
limitations on female creativity and subjectivity, beginning to reshape cultural
notions of motherhood, art, and the female body at the turn of the twentieth
century.