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

这个奖学金将探讨妇女的写作和装饰艺术在十九世纪后半叶之间的联系。在这样做的时候，它将探讨被忽视或被认为是低等的艺术生产形式，因为与女性，流行和日常有关。这一观点将与MAKE Southwest，Killerton House和其他地方的合作伙伴分享，以共同创造遗产和创意环境中的当代体现研究。这些相互关联的研究和参与方法将：- 通过使我能够完成研究女性作家如何看待装饰艺术的形式，技术和功能来发展我的研究生涯，以此作为在国内现实主义模式中将自己的作品定义为艺术形式的一种方式。-与历史和当代装饰艺术和手工艺相关的遗产和创意专业人士合作，以及分享体现研究和历史和文本分析的方面。我的奖学金的两个方面都旨在重新考虑性别生产形式，当时和现在往往被认为是次要的或文化上的低劣，一个纠正我认为是至关重要的。对所谓的“小说艺术”辩论的批判性讨论，引发了对小说地位的重新评价，主要集中在更高的文化体裁，如美学小说和规范作家，如亨利詹姆斯，它起源于19世纪80年代末这个项目探讨了国内现实主义的女作家如何通过寻找装饰，而不是美术，艺术作为一个模型，为小说的艺术提出了更早的要求。装饰艺术，艺术和工艺插画家和设计师沃尔特起重机描述为“人民的艺术，普通事物和普通生活的艺术”，创造了一种日常美学，证明了对那些寻求将这种类型作为一种严肃艺术形式的女性作家有用。19世纪50年代家庭现实主义的女性创作者对仍然存在的在世纪，这种体裁在艺术的文化等级中只占一个中等地位的流行观念。几乎总是女性也会参加。这一时期妇女的家庭手工艺品无处不在，这意味着大多数妇女参与了多种形式的创造性制作，其中大部分从未被保存或记录，因为它被认为是个人的，业余的，或短暂的。该奖学金将与项目合作伙伴合作，调查妇女装饰工艺品最常见的制作形式。一个拼凑的对象将在该项目的过程中，由当代艺术家领导，探索妇女的经验，使艺术的共同生活。这件物品还将数字化，以接触到更广泛的国际受众。这将通过围绕埃克塞特大学档案馆中最近发现的一件罕见且具有文化价值的物品进行进一步的数字化和协作工作来加入：一本20卷的手稿文学杂志，名为“忙碌的蜜蜂”，其中包括30多位业余散文家的贡献，以及著名的国内现实主义小说家夏洛特扬格的文章。通过研究和参与活动的结合，该奖学金旨在考虑女性作家如何在装饰艺术形式方面概念化他们的写作，以及他们制作这些物品的经验如何影响他们对创造性工作性质的思考。它将部署一系列关于女作家的个案研究，这些女作家的作品因使用家庭现实主义模式而被忽视或被认为是二流的。奖学金的历史和创造性/协作方面都将在十九世纪装饰艺术生产原则的框架内进行，并旨在研究文学和工艺过程的相互性。

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.