Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics

Description

Feminist art and literary criticism has already shown that there are other standards by which we can judge the past, and in terms of which we can recognize the greatness of past women creation. The perspective of woman's Otherness helps obscure the women artists hidden in history by treating them as not-fully-individual. The work of women writers and artists has to be constructed into individual oeuvres and situated in traditions of female creativity. These traditions will be different from the traditions of male achievement, because males did not have to confront the rhetoric of sexual exclusion each time they tried to create. In calling a woman a 'genius', feminist critics (collectively) reconstruct history from the point of view of their own value scheme. The process is already well under way, although it has a long way to go yet. This book thus uses cultural history to validate a feminist aesthetics that renders visible, interprets and also evaluates the achievements of great, individual women artists. Contents Starting Out Amongst the Ghosts The Clouded Mirror The Male Gift The Great 'I am' The Genesis of Genius The Genitals of Genius The Passionate Revolution The Gender Revolution The Daughters' Dilemma The Third Sex A Degenerate Breed Scientific Facts and Aesthetic Values The Margins Within Post-modernism and the Female Author Notes Bibliography Index