Kristin Bluemel, Ph.D., interim associate dean, McMurray School of Humanities and Social Sciences, professor of English and Wayne D. McMurray and Helen Bennett Endowed Chair in the Humanities, has won a publication grant from the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center on Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, for her forthcoming book. “Enchanted Wood: Engraving a Place for Women Artists in Rural Britain.” Publication is scheduled for fall 2025 by the University of Minnesota Press.
The prestigious grant will help support costly reproductions of the book’s many black and white illustrations and color plates by its subjects, artists Gwen Raverat, Agnes Miller Parker, Clare Leighton, and Joan Hassall, as well as reproductions of wood engravings by the man who inspired them, the legendary eighteenth-century artist and printer, Thomas Bewick. Raverat, Miller Parker, Leighton, and Hassall all cared about the whole process of book making and book reading. They emerge in “Enchanted Wood” as important literary characters fully engaged with their modern worlds, representing larger social and cultural movements to redraw the boundaries of women’s living. With it’s beautiful illustrations, “Enchanted Wood” reveals how and why wood engraving facilitated this transformation in female living in rural and urban places, and why woman wood engravers who took up the materials and techniques used by Bewick and his male descendants were able to achieve professional stature, public affirmation, and personal independence.
Agnes Miller Parker, Herons, from H. E. Bates Down the River (1937).