"Pen vs. Paintbrush explores the sibling rivalry between the sister arts from 1789 to 1830, focusing on the anxieties of aesthetics, artistic selfhood, and masculinity as they were brought forth in a competition between painters and authors for ascendancy during a period when definitions of gender and genre had been radically destabilized.

The competition for aesthetic hegemony, prompted by the uncertainties of artistic production in postrevolutionary France, further reflected a crisis in gender and artists' response to the threatening spectre of female subjecthood. The works of Anne-Louis Girodet and Honore de Balzac manifest this twofold rivalry of gender and genre in their compulsive reworkings of the myth of Pygmalion. Pen vs.

Paintbrush documents the ways in which this emblematic pair of artists responded to and represented the anxieties of artistic production, identity, and gender that confronted an entire generation."--BOOK JACKET.