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Bailey Van Hook is Associate Professor of Art History at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

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9780271024790

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Angels of Art is a fascinating examination of how images of women have functioned in the ongoing construction of a national identity. Well illustrated, it reads like an adventure story. --Feminist Bookstore News

In her superb study, Van Hook works simultaneously as art and cultural historian, chronicling the preoccupation with the female figure in post-Civil War art on the part of a new generation of cosmopolitan, European-trained artists. Taking turn-of-the-century writings by artists, popular journalists, art critics, and historians as her guide, the author analyzes what these works meant to their audiences and how they shaped the notion of the feminine. She argues that the prevailing definitions of 'art' and 'culture' in the Gilded Age were analogous to the construction of the feminine gender, resulting in the 'inevitable' dominance of ideal images of women. --Ellen Todd, George Mason University

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Bailey Van Hook is Associate Professor of Art History at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

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