{"product_id":"9780817382162","title":"Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts","description":"\u003cb\u003eAn insightful look at representations of women’s bodies and female authority.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e This work explores Edith Wharton's career-long concern with a 19th-century visual culture that limited female artistic agency and expression. Wharton repeatedly invoked the visual arts--especially painting—as a medium for revealing the ways that women's bodies have been represented (as passive, sexualized, infantalized, sickly, dead). Well-versed in the Italian masters, Wharton made special use of the art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, particularly its penchant for producing not portraits of individual women but instead icons onto whose bodies male desire is superimposed.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Emily Orlando contends that while Wharton's early work presents women enshrined by men through art, the middle and later fiction shifts the seat of power to women. From Lily Bart in \u003ci\u003eThe House of Mirth\u003c\/i\u003e to Undine Spragg in \u003ci\u003eThe Custom of the Country\u003c\/i\u003e and Ellen Olenska in \u003ci\u003eThe Age of Innocence\u003c\/i\u003e, women evolve from victims to vital agents, securing for themselves a more empowering and satisfying relationship to art and to their own identities.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Orlando also studies the lesser-known short stories and novels, revealing Wharton’s re-workings of texts by Browning, Poe, Balzac, George Eliot, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and, most significantly, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. \u003ci\u003eEdith Wharton and the Visual Arts\u003c\/i\u003e is the first extended study to examine the presence in Wharton's fiction of the Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting of Rossetti and his muses, notably Elizabeth Siddall and Jane Morris. Wharton emerges as one of American literature's most gifted inter-textual realists, providing a vivid lens through which to view issues of power, resistance, and social change as they surface in American literature and culture.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e","brand":"University of Alabama Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47110642663664,"sku":"9780817382162","price":29.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780817382162","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}