The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter

The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter
Author :
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Total Pages : 266
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780820341149
ISBN-13 : 0820341142
Rating : 4/5 (49 Downloads)

Book Synopsis The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter by : Mary Titus

Download or read book The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter written by Mary Titus and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During a life that spanned ninety years, Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) witnessed dramatic and intensely debated changes in the gender roles of American women. Mary Titus draws upon unpublished Porter papers, as well as newly available editions of her early fiction, poetry, and reviews, to trace Porter’s shifting and complex response to those cultural changes. Titus shows how Porter explored her own ambivalence about gender and creativity, for she experienced firsthand a remarkable range of ideas concerning female sexuality. These included the Victorian attitudes of the grandmother who raised her; the sexual license of revolutionary Mexico, 1920s New York, and 1930s Paris; and the conservative, ordered attitudes of the Agrarians. Throughout Porter’s long career, writes Titus, she “repeatedly probed cultural arguments about female creativity, a woman’s maternal legacy, romantic love, and sexual identity, always with startling acuity, and often with painful ambivalence.” Much of her writing, then, serves as a medium for what Titus terms Porter’s “gender-thinking”--her sustained examination of the interrelated issues of art, gender, and identity. Porter, says Titus, rebelled against her upbringing yet never relinquished the belief that her work as an artist was somehow unnatural, a turn away from the essential identity of woman as “the repository of life,” as childbearer. In her life Porter increasingly played a highly feminized public role as southern lady, but in her writing she continued to engage changing representations of female identity and sexuality. This is an important new study of the tensions and ambivalence inscribed in Porter’s fiction, as well as the vocational anxiety and gender performance of her actual life.


The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter Related Books

The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter
Language: en
Pages: 266
Authors: Mary Titus
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2012-02-01 - Publisher: University of Georgia Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

During a life that spanned ninety years, Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) witnessed dramatic and intensely debated changes in the gender roles of American wome
Selected Letters of Katherine Anne Porter
Language: en
Pages: 412
Authors: Darlene Harbour Unrue
Categories: Literary Collections
Type: BOOK - Published: 2012-11-28 - Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) produced a relatively small body of fiction, but she wrote thousands and thousands of letters. The present selection of 135
Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction
Language: en
Pages: 286
Authors: Darlene Harbour Unrue
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2008-12-01 - Publisher: University of Georgia Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

My stories are fragments of a larger plan, Katherine Anne Porter once wrote. And on another occasion she praised a critic who perceived that all her work, from
Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools
Language: en
Pages: 260
Authors: Thomas Austenfeld
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2015-04-15 - Publisher: University of North Texas Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Containing pieces by distinguished scholars including Darlene Harbour Unrue and Robert Brinkmeyer, this book is the first full investigation of the links betwee
Artistic Ambivalence in Clay
Language: en
Pages: 185
Authors: Courtney Lee Weida
Categories: Art
Type: BOOK - Published: 2011-05-25 - Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book is a collection of glimpses into the lives and works of fifteen prominent women artists in contemporary ceramics. Spanning multiple genres, generation