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Sunday, September 25, 2005

Sunday, September 25, 2005 10:15 pm by M.   No comments
A couple of the books mentioned in our selection of forthcoming books (see the right bar) are already available.

On the one hand we have "Reading the Brontë Body: Disease, Desire and the Constraints of Culture" by Beth Torgerson. According to the publisher's web:

Description
Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Brontë's literary representations of illness and disease reflect the major role illness played in the lives of the Victorians and its frequent reoccurrence within the Brontës' personal lives. An in-depth analysis of the history of nineteenth-century medicine provides the necessary cultural context to understand these representations, giving modern readers a sense of how health, illness, and the body were understood in Victorian England. Together, medical anthropology and the history of medicine offer a useful lens with which to understand Victorian texts. Reading the Brontë Body is the first scholarly attempt to provide both the theoretical framework and historical background to make such a literary analysis of the Brontë novels possible, while exploring how these representations of disease and illness work within a larger cultural framework.
Contents
Introduction
'Sick of Mankind and Their Disgusting Ways': Alcoholism, Social Reform, and Anne Brontë's Narratives of Illness
Ailing Women in the Age of Cholera: Illness in Shirley
Hysteria, Female Desire, and Self-Control in Villette
Vampires, Ghosts, and the Disease of Dis/Possession
Conclusion
Author Biographies
BETH TORGERSON is currently an Assistant Professor at Flagler College in St. Augustine, USA. The recipient of the Bechtol Lee Doctoral Fellowship, she attended King's College London, UK for a year as an affiliated research student, where she participated in their Victorian Studies graduate program. Her scholarly work has appeared in Victorian Review and Disabilities Studies Quarterly. Also a poet, her poetry has appeared in The Texas Review, Plains Song Review, as well as in several anthologies.

On the other hand the collected "Letters of Reverend Patrick Brontë" in an edition supervised by Dudley Green published by Nonsuch Publishing is also currently available. In the amazon synopsys we read:


"Patrick Bronte was the father of arguably the most famous literary family in the world, with his three daughter's names ranked among the greatest of writers. Their life in the Haworth Parsonage is one that still holds a fascination a century and a half after their deaths and is subject to more than little myth-making. Patrick Bronte in this mythology is often castigated as a cold and even uncaring figure who dominated the lives of his more famous children. However, in this, the first ever complete collection of his surviving letters, some of which have never been published before, Dudley Green helps rehabilitate his subject's reputation and shows him to be a tolerant and attentive father. A prolific writer, he was an energetic campaigner on a wide range of religious, social and political issues. His letters reveal an educated man, passionate about his causes but, furthermore, in a family beset by so much tragedy, they reveal a very human side to this misunderstood man. "


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