Writers and Artists in Dialogue ― Historical Fiction About Women Painters

This unique work of scholarship explores contemporary issues of male spectatorship and the importance of biography for art criticism in the work of Tracy Chevalier, Eunice Lipton, Anna Banti, Kate Braverman, and Susan Vreeland. Drawing upon feminist concepts on the male and female gaze, Dr. Cortney Cronberg Barko perceptively examines how these authors challenge androcentric models of reading by demonstrating women’s powers as readers and writers. This intriguing study reveals that authors working within the genre of fictionalized biographies of women painters reconstruct art history to create a new canon for women artists and invent a rhetoric about art that empowers women. This book is ideal for art history courses and a wide range of literature courses, including fiction, literary theory, literary criticism, feminist literary theory, and women's literature.

Cortney Cronberg Barko received her Ph.D. in English from Northern Illinois University. She also holds graduate certificates in women’s studies and museum studies. Her areas of specialization are twentieth-century American literature, women’s studies and feminist theory. Currently, she is Assistant Professor of English at West Virginia University Institute of Technology in Montgomery, where she teaches courses in composition, literature, and editing. Dr. Barko is the author of ?Rediscovering Female Voice and Authority: The Revival of Female Artists in Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles? published in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. She is also the Vice President/President Elect of the Midwest Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association.