The female performer with a public voice constitutes a remarkably vibrant theme in British and American narratives of the long nineteenth century. The tension between fictional female performers and other textual voices can be seen to refigure the cultural debate over the ‘voice’ of women in aesthetically complex ways. By focusing on singers, actresses, preachers and speakers, this book traces and explores an important tradition of feminine articulation. Drawing on critical approaches in literary studies, gender studies and philosophy, the book conceptualizes voice for the discussion of narrative texts. Examining voice both as a thematic concern and as an aesthetic effect, the individual chapters analyse how the actual articulation by female performers correlates with their cultural visibility and agency. What this study foregrounds is how women characters succeed in making themselves heard even if their voices are silenced in the end.

This book examines how African-American writers and visual artists interweave icon and inscription in order to re-present the black female body, traditionally rendered alien and inarticulate within Western discursive and visual systems. Brown considers how the writings of Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, Andrea Lee, Gloria Naylor, and Martha Southgate are bound to such contemporary, postmodern visual artists as Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker, Betye Saar, and Faith Ringgold. While the artists and authors rely on radically different media—photos, collage, video, and assembled objects, as opposed to words and rhythm—both sets of intellectual activists insist on the primacy of the black aesthetic. Both assert artistic agency and cultural continuity in the face of the oppression, social transformation, and cultural multiplicity of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book examines how African-American performative practices mediate the tension between the ostensibly de-racialized body politic and the hyper-racialized black, female body, reimagining the cultural and political ground that guides various articulations of American national belonging. Brown shows how and why black women writers and artists matter as agents of change, how and why the form and content of their works must be recognized and reconsidered in the increasingly frenzied arena of cultural production and political debate.

This book is concerned with the figure of the female performer in nineteenth-century fiction. It explores the attitudes of Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Emile Zola towards women’s appearances on political daises and theatrical stages. Literature as a cultural force can either boost women’s participation in public life or bolster the patriarchal ideology. The book verifies Henry James’s feminist ideology that lies behind the positive representation of women’s political activism and acting, as two different modes of performance, through a comparative study between him and two of his contemporary novelists. It reflects the clash of opinions among nineteenth-century American and French authors on the issue of women’s public manifestation as caught between the spectacular and the political. While some writers have deemed it an exhibitionist demeanour, others have considered it a commitment to the feminist project. The first section shows how a feminist reading in the history of European and American female performers as emerging figures in the nineteenth century can help to understand the position of the figure in the literary works of the period. Nathaniel Hawthorne is shown to be an author who holds the same feminist temperament as James through his portrayal of a talented political rhetorician in his novel The Blithedale Romance, which is compared to James’s The Bostonians in the second section. The final part conducts a study in contrasts between James’s supportive rendering of the actress in The Tragic Muse and Emile Zola’s derogatory stereotyping of the female performer as a prostitute in his novel Nana.

Ever since Bessie Smith’s powerful voice conspired with the “race records” industry to make her a star in the 1920s, African American writers have memorialized the sounds and theorized the politics of black women’s singing. In Black Resonance, Emily J. Lordi analyzes writings by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, and Nikki Giovanni that engage such iconic singers as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, and Aretha Franklin. Focusing on two generations of artists from the 1920s to the 1970s, Black Resonance reveals a musical-literary tradition in which singers and writers, faced with similar challenges and harboring similar aims, developed comparable expressive techniques. Drawing together such seemingly disparate works as Bessie Smith’s blues and Richard Wright’s neglected film of Native Son, Mahalia Jackson’s gospel music and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, each chapter pairs one writer with one singer to crystallize the artistic practice they share: lyricism, sincerity, understatement, haunting, and the creation of a signature voice. In the process, Lordi demonstrates that popular female singers are not passive muses with raw, natural, or ineffable talent. Rather, they are experimental artists who innovate black expressive possibilities right alongside their literary peers. The first study of black music and literature to centralize the music of black women, Black Resonance offers new ways of reading and hearing some of the twentieth century’s most beloved and challenging voices.

Five centuries of fascinating female creativity presented in more than 400 compelling artworks and one comprehensive volume The most extensive fully illustrated book of women artists ever published, Great Women Artists reflects an era where art made by women is more prominent than ever. In museums, galleries, and the art market, previously overlooked female artists, past and present, are now gaining recognition and value. Featuring more than 400 artists from more than 50 countries and spanning 500 years of creativity, each artist is represented here by a key artwork and short text. This essential volume reveals a parallel yet equally engaging history of art for an age that champions a greater diversity of voices. "Real changes are upon us, and today one can reel off the names of a number of first-rate women artists. Nevertheless, women are just getting started."—The New Yorker

Taking up works by Samuel Richardson, James Fenimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick, among others, Jennifer B. Camden examines the role of female characters who, while embodying the qualities associated with heroines, fail to achieve this status in the story. These "secondary heroines," often the friend or sister of the primary heroine, typically disappear from the action of the novel as the courtship plot progresses, only to return near the conclusion of the action with renewed demands on the reader's attention. Accounting for this persistent pattern, Camden suggests, reveals the cultural work performed by these unusual figures in the early history of the novel. Because she is often a far more vivid character than the heroine of the marriage plot, the secondary heroine inevitably engages the reader's interest in her plight. That the narrative apparently seeks to suppress her creates tension and points to the secondary heroine as a site of contested identity who represents an ideology of womanhood and nationhood at odds with the national ideals represented by the primary heroine, whom the reader is asked to embrace. In showing how the anxiety produced by these ideals is displaced onto the secondary heroine, Camden's study represents an important intervention into the ways in which early novels use character to further ideologies of race, class, sex, and gender.

Between January 1880 and December 1889, Harper's Monthly Magazine published 263 works of fiction; half of these were written by women. Judging by the popularity of contemporary mass-circulation magazines. women writers of the late nineteenth century enjoyed equal opportunity in the world of commercial publishing. Yet although they wrote best-sellers and won prizes, the institutions that keep writers and their reputations alive chose not to sustain these writers, and few are familiar today; Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton. Elsa Nettels suggests that this lack of parity is not surprising in a culture that for centuries has used" masculine" to describe all things strong and dominant, while "feminine" has signified weakness and inferiority. In Victorian America, the relation of literary style to gender became of increasing interest as women writers became ever more prominent. In the influential magazines of the late nineteenth century -- Harper's, Century, Scribner's, Atlantic Monthly, Cosmopolitan, and Ladies' Home Journal -- writers directly or implicitly reflected society's views of the sexes and the proper roles of men and women. In this intelligent and accessible book, the author examines how William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather helped both to perpetuate and to subvert Victorian America's ideology of language and gender. All had fruitful careers as novelists, editors, and critics, and she demonstrates that each was in a unique position to affect popular language and gender stereotypes. To gauge their responses to the pervasive assumptions held by the magazines that published them, Nettels traces how these writersdefined "masculine" and "feminine" in their works, how they characterized women's speech and language, how they distinguished male and female discourse, and where they invested authority in matters of usage. Taking into account others engaged in the Victorian construction of gender such as grammarians, linguists, sociologists, and writers on etiquette, Nettels offers a compelling look at the cultural perpetuation of ideologies, as well as fascinating scholarship on four authors who manipulated social mores to establish their place in American literature.