Creative negativity : four Victorian exemplars of the female quest
"Focusing on the early Modern and Victorian periods, the author finds covert revolutionaries in four female practioners of a strategy she calls creative negativity. She opens up for inspection the lives and creative endeavors of poet-photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), novelist-essayist Anne Thackeray Ritchie (1837-1919), activist-spiritual leader Annie Besant (1847-1933), and actress-writer Elizabeth Robins (1862-1952)." "As she explores the interacting elements of creative negativity that their work exemplifies, the author demonstrates how the artistic and performative techniques employed by the four women provide them with the rhetorical tools with which they can construct, take apart, and reconstruct themselves. This uniquely interactive response propels the women through their successful enactments of the female quest." "Overall, this book provides a working model for seeing how a covert feminism operated during a key period of history."--Jacket
Print Book, English, 2001
Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif., 2001
Biography
xix, 275 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780804738293, 0804738297
46394034
List of illustrations; Preface; 1. Creative negativity and the female quest; 2. The singular double vision of Julia Margaret Cameron; 3. Self-erasure and self-creation in Anne Thackeray Ritchie; 4. The multiple deconversions of Annie Wood Besant; 5. Elizabeth Robins outperforms the new woman; Epilogue: the female quest reconsidered; Notes; Index.