The Art of Fiction: Women's Writing and the Decorative Arts

小说的艺术：女性写作和装饰艺术

• 批准号: AH/X011518/1
• 负责人: Patricia Zakreski
• 金额: $ 29.82万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF EXETER
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Fellowship
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2023 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FX011518%2F1
• 关键词: Art; Fiction; Women; Writing; Decorative

This fellowship will explore the connections between women's writing and the decorative arts in the second half of the nineteenth century. In doing so, it will explore forms of artistic production that were neglected or considered inferior because associated with the feminine, the popular and the everyday. This perspective will be shared with partners in MAKE Southwest, Killerton House and elsewhere to co-create contemporary embodied research in heritage and creative environments. These interlinked methods of research and engagement will:- Develop my research career by enabling me to complete research into how women writers looked to the forms, techniques and functions of the decorative arts as a way of defining their own work in the domestic realist mode as a form of art. - Engage heritage and creative professionals in relation to historical and contemporary decorative arts and crafting, as well as sharing aspects of embodied research and historical and textual analysis.Both strands of my fellowship have been designed to reconsider gendered forms of production then and now too often considered as minor or culturally inferior, a corrective I believe to be vital.Critical discussions of what has become known as the "Art of Fiction" debate, which initiated a re-evaluation of the status of the novel, have mostly centred on higher cultural genres such as the Aesthetic novel and canonical writers such as Henry James, locating its origins in the late 1880s. This project explores how women writers of domestic realism made much earlier claims for the art of the novel by looking to the decorative, rather than the fine, arts as a model. Decorative arts, which the Arts and Crafts illustrator and designer Walter Crane described as "the art of the people, the art of common things and common life," created an aesthetics of the everyday that proved useful for those women writers who sought to make claims for this genre as a serious form of art. Thus, the female makers of domestic realism from the 1850s present an immanent challenge to the still-prevalent notion that this genre occupied only a modest position in the cultural hierarchy of the arts in the nineteenth century.Women writers of this time were almost always also women crafters. The ubiquity of women's domestic handicrafts in this period meant that most women were involved in multiple forms of creative making, much of which was never preserved or recorded because it was considered personal, amateur, or ephemeral. The fellowship will engage with project partners to investigate the forms of making most common to women's decorative craft work. A patchwork object will be constructed over the course of the project, led by a contemporary artist, to explore women's experience of making the art of common life. This object will also be digitized to reach a wider international audience. This will be joined by further digitization and collaborative work around a rare and culturally invaluable, recently-discovered object housed in the archives at the University of Exeter: a 20-volume manuscript literary magazine titled "The Busy Bee," that includes contributions from over 30 amateur essayists, as well as articles from eminent domestic realist novelist, Charlotte Yonge. Through this combination of research and engagement activities, this fellowship is designed to consider how women writers conceptualized their writing in terms of decorative art forms and how their experience of making such objects influenced their thinking about the nature of creative work. It will deploy a series of case studies of women writers whose work has been neglected or considered second-rate because of their use of the domestic realist mode. The historical and creative/collaborative aspects of the fellowship will both be conducted within the framework set by nineteenth-century principles of decorative art production, and are intended to examine the mutuality of the literary and the craft process.

该奖学金将探讨19世纪下半叶女性写作与装饰艺术之间的联系。这样一来，它将探索与女性，受欢迎和日常的女性相关的艺术作品形式。这种观点将与Make Southwest，Killerton House和其他地方的合作伙伴共享，以共同创建遗产和创造性环境中的当代体现研究。这些相互联系的研究和参与方法将： - 通过使我能够完成研究女性作家如何看待装饰艺术的形式，技术和功能的研究来发展我的研究职业，以此作为一种在家庭现实主义模式下定义自己的作品作为一种艺术形式。 - 与历史和当代的装饰艺术和制作有关，并分享了体现的研究以及历史和文本分析的各个方面。对小说的地位的重新评估主要集中在较高的文化类型上，例如美学小说和典型的作家，例如亨利·詹姆斯（Henry James），在1880年代后期定位其起源。该项目探讨了国内现实主义的女性作家如何通过将装饰性而不是精美的艺术作为模型来提早提出了小说艺术的主张。装饰艺术，艺术插画家和设计师沃尔特·克雷恩（Walter Crane）被描述为“人民的艺术，常见事物和共同生活的艺术”，创造了每天的美学，证明对那些试图为这种类型的艺术作出主张的女性作家有用。因此，从1850年代开始的国内现实主义女性制造者对仍然有价值的观念提出了一个根本性的挑战，即这种流派在19世纪的艺术文化等级中仅占据了一个适中的地位。这段时间的妇女作家几乎总是女性的手工艺者。在此期间，妇女家庭手工艺的无处不在意味着大多数妇女都参与了多种形式的创造性制作，其中大部分从未被保存或记录，因为它被认为是个人，业余或短暂的。奖学金将与项目合作伙伴互动，以调查使女性装饰工艺最常见的形式。由当代艺术家领导的项目将在整个项目的过程中建造一个拼凑的对象，以探讨女性创造共同生活艺术的经验。该对象也将被数字化以吸引更广泛的国际观众。这将通过进一步的数字化和合作工作，围绕埃克塞特大学的档案中的一本稀有且具有文化上的物品，最近被发现的物品：一本名为“忙碌的蜜蜂”的20卷手稿文学杂志，其中包括30多名业余派众的贡献。通过这种研究和参与活动的结合，该奖学金旨在考虑女性作家如何从装饰艺术形式的文字概念上概念化她们的写作，以及他们制作此类物体的经验如何影响他们对创意工作本质的思考。由于使用国内现实主义模式，它将部署一系列女性作家的案例研究，这些案例研究被忽略或被视为二流。奖学金的历史和创造性/协作方面都将在19世纪的装饰艺术生产原则设定的框架内进行，并旨在研究文学和工艺过程的相互关系。