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

该奖学金将探索19世纪下半叶女性写作与装饰艺术之间的联系。在这样做的过程中，它将探索被忽视或被认为低劣的艺术生产形式，因为它们与女性、流行和日常生活联系在一起。这一观点将与Make Southwest、Killerton House和其他地方的合作伙伴分享，共同创建遗产和创意环境中的当代具象研究。这些相互关联的研究和参与方法将：-通过使我能够完成对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事业，以一种方式在国内现实主义模式下将她们的作品定义为一种艺术形式。-邀请遗产和创意专业人士与历史和当代装饰艺术和手工艺有关，以及分享具体化研究和历史和文本分析的方面。我的两篇联谊会都是为了重新考虑当时和现在经常被认为是次要的或文化上次要的生产形式，这是一种纠正措施，我认为这是一种至关重要的纠正措施。对这场已成为众所周知的、引发了对小说地位的重新评估的评论性讨论，主要集中在更高的文化体裁，如美学小说和经典作家，如亨利·詹姆斯，将其起源于19世纪80年代末。这个项目探讨了国内现实主义女作家如何通过寻找装饰艺术而不是精美艺术作为典范，更早地声称小说的艺术。装饰艺术被工艺美术插画家兼设计师沃尔特·克兰描述为“人民的艺术，普通事物和普通生活的艺术”，它创造了一种日常生活的美学，事实证明，这对那些试图将装饰艺术作为一种严肃的艺术形式的女性作家很有用。因此，19世纪50年代以来的家庭现实主义女性制造者对仍然盛行的观念提出了内在的挑战，即这一流派在19世纪的艺术文化等级中只占据了适度的地位。这个时代的女性作家几乎都是女性工匠。在这一时期，妇女的家庭手工艺无处不在，这意味着大多数妇女参与了多种形式的创造性制作，其中许多从未被保存或记录下来，因为它被认为是私人的、业余的或短暂的。该研究金将与项目合作伙伴合作，调查最常见的妇女装饰工艺品的制作形式。在该项目的整个过程中，将由一位当代艺术家领导建造一个拼凑的物体，以探索女性在创造日常生活艺术方面的经验。这件物品也将被数字化，以接触到更广泛的国际观众。此外，还将围绕埃克塞特大学档案馆中最近发现的一件罕见的、具有文化价值的物品进行进一步的数字化和合作：一本名为《忙碌的蜜蜂》的20卷手稿文学杂志，其中包括30多名业余散文家的投稿，以及国内著名现实主义小说家夏洛特·容格的文章。通过这种研究和参与活动的结合，该研究金旨在考虑女性作家如何从装饰艺术形式的角度概念化她们的写作，以及她们制作这种物品的经历如何影响她们对创造性工作性质的思考。它将对女性作家进行一系列案例研究，她们的作品因使用国内现实主义模式而被忽视或被视为二流作家。研究金的历史和创作/合作方面都将在十九世纪装饰艺术生产原则确定的框架内进行，旨在审查文学和手工艺过程的相互关系。

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.