In Women Writing the American Artist in Novels of Development from 1850-1932: The Artist Embodied, Rickie-Ann Legleitner makes a substantial contribution to the scholarship on the female artist novel of development through compelling analyses of patriarchal America’s resistance to recognizing women artists as creators of high art. In five Künstleromane published between 1850 and 1932, Legleitner focuses on how her selected women writers reconfigure accepted domestic and sentimental themes into declarations of female individualism and autonomy that establish the female body’s generative capabilities not only for corporeal reproduction but for liberating cultural production. Complicating the analyses through tropes of race, ethnicity, class and ability, the study examines the female fictional artists negotiating private and public spaces, the home and the marketplace, much as the women writers who created them did.

Rita Bode, Professor of English Literature, Trent University

Rickie-Ann Legleitner’s The Artist Embodied significantly advances scholarship on the American Künstlerroman, Legleitner’s scope is both impressive and inclusive: it is hard to remember another study that bookends E.D.E.N. Southworth and Zelda Fitzgerald. Dramatizing the cultural boundaries that impede female creatives’ transformation from object to agent, this study dissects links between the craft and the body and between incarnation and imprisonment. Willa Cather and Kate Chopin fans will find compelling new insights, while those who need a refresher on Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Jesse Fauset will rediscover why recovering their work has been so culturally crucial.

Kirk Curnutt, Executive Director, The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society

Women Writing the American Artist in Novels of Development from 1850-1932 does not shy away from addressing some of the most persistent and, it must be said, pernicious suppositions about women's writing. Refreshingly, it does so not through hagiography of its subjects or setting up a battle of the sexes. Instead, it offers a reading of the development of women's writing on its own terms from the mid-nineteenth century to the modernist age.

The Fitzgerald Review