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COPYRIGHT 2003 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
Creative Negativity: Four Victorian Exemplars of the Female Quest. By Carol Hanbery MacKay. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. xix + 275 pages.
Many scholars working in a variety of disciplines claim to offer innovative feminist theoretical paradigms for the analysis of historical figures, issues, texts, or artifacts. Carol Hanbery MacKay is no exception. Author of Creative Negativity: Four Victorian Exemplars of the Female Quest, she argues that such Victorian questors as Julia Margaret Cameron, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Annie Wood Besant, and Elizabeth Robins apply a set of strategies she denotes "creative negativity" to enable and disguise their journeys of self. She defines this "complex of rhetorical and performative techniques by which certain women of the period construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct themselves" (3) by specifying a total of six interrelated qualities and explicating their manifestation in each woman's creative work. Concepts such as "self-referentiality," the coalescing of "reality and illusion," and "an altered sense of time" individually and jointly reinforce the ambivalence and crafted elusiveness of the women's selfhood. MacKay's book is in some respects a model of my taste in scholarship--it features a clear, accessible writing style that contains little jargon and offers a fresh interdisciplinary and cross-genre perspective on recently rediscovered creative women. Moreover, MacKay avers that the women whose representational aesthetics she explores--a photographer, a writer, a theosophist, and...
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