Ebook: Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics

Feminist art and literary criticism has already shown that there are
other standards by which we can judge the past, and in terms of which
we can recognize the greatness of past women creation. The perspective
of woman's Otherness helps obscure the women artists hidden in
history by treating them as not-fully-individual. The work of women
writers and artists has to be constructed into individual oeuvres and
situated in traditions of female creativity.

These traditions will be different from the traditions of male achievement, because males did
not have to confront the rhetoric of sexual exclusion each time they
tried to create. In calling a woman a 'genius', feminist critics (collectively)
reconstruct history from the point of view of their own value
scheme. The process is already well under way, although it has a long
way to go yet. This book thus uses cultural history to validate a feminist
aesthetics that renders visible, interprets and also evaluates the achievements
of great, individual women artists.