Writing the Woman Artist

Book excerpt: "I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill."—Virginia Woolf, Professions for Women Writing The Woman Artist is a collection of essays that explores the ways in which women writers portray women painters, sculptors, writers, and performers. Surveying the works of a variety of women writers—from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from different ethnic, national , racial, and economic backgrounds—this book treats their revisions of the Künstlerroman and their perceptions of the relationships between muse, artist, and audience in other genres. Suzanne W. ]ones and her collaborators seek to understand how representations of women artists and their poetics and politics are mediated by social and historical factors, including literary movements and theories of language. In doing so, they make an important contribution to the field of feminist scholarship, and generate new ways of understanding how the dynamics of creativity intersect with the dynamics of gender. Contributors to the volume are Ann Ardis, Alison Booth , Kathleen Brogan, Lynda Bundtzen, Pamela Caughie, Mary DeShazer, Linda Dittmar, Josephine Donovan, Susan Stanford Friedman , Gayle Greene, Linda Hunt, Katherine Kearns, Holly Laird, Estella Lauter, Z. Nelly Martinez, Jane Atteridge Rose, Margaret Diane Stetz, Renate Voris, and Mara Witzling. Writing The Woman Artist is a valuable new resource for scholars and students working in the fields of European and American literature and women's studies.