The Art of Fiction: Women's Writing and the Decorative Arts
Lead Research Organisation:
UNIVERSITY OF EXETER
Department Name: English
Abstract
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.
- 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.
