Pen vs. paintbrush : Girodet, Balzac, and the myth of Pygmalion in postrevolutionary France

Author(s)

    • Wettlaufer, Alexandra

Bibliographic Information

Pen vs. paintbrush : Girodet, Balzac, and the myth of Pygmalion in postrevolutionary France

Alexandra K. Wettlaufer

Palgrave, 2001.6

1st ed

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. [249]-311) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

"Pen vs Paintbrush" explores the sibling rivalry between the sister arts from 1789-1830, focusing on the anxieties of aesthetics, artistic selfhood, and masculinity as they are brought forth in a competition between painters and authors for ascendancy during a period when definitions of gender and genre had been radically destabilized. The competition for aesthetic hegemony, prompted by the uncertainties of artistic production in post-revolutionary France, further reflected a crisis in gender and artists' response to the threatening spectre of female subjecthood. The works of Anne Louis Girodet and Honore de Balzac manifest this two fold rivalry of gender and genre in their compulsive reworkings of the myth of Pygmalion. This volume documents the ways in which this emblematic pair of artists responded to and represented the anxieties of artistic production, identity, and gender that confronted an entire generation.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Pygmalion and the Paragone - Girodet's Endymion: Painting between the Centuries - Girodet: Poet and Painter - Pygmalion, the Patron, Politics and the Press: A Portrait of the Artist in Restoration France - Allegories of Reading: Balzac's Maison du chat-qui-pelote - Sarrasine: Gender, Genre and the Female Reader - Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu: Pygmalion Denied

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