Studies in English Literature issue

The last issue of "SEL Studies in English Literature. 1500-1900", a journal published quaterly by the Rice University, comes with some interesting papers for Brontë scholars. The four annual issues of the SEL journal are devoted to different periods of the English literature. The Autumn one focus on the nineteenth century period.

Kees, Lara Freeburg
"Sympathy" in Jane Eyre
SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 - Volume 45, Number 4, Autumn 2005, pp. 873-897
Abstract
In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë dramatizes an eighteenth-century understanding of sympathy as Jane and Rochester struggle to unite. This paper considers two important results of empiricism that inform this struggle. The first is the abolitionists' use of the language of sympathy, which complicates our understanding of how Brontë uses race and class. The second is the moral-philosophical void left by empiricism and, according to Alasdair MacIntyre, left unresolved by Enlightenment moral philosophy. By the novel's conclusion, sympathy fails to erase the borders of race and class and to replace orthodox religious faith. Jane Eyre illustrates the Enlightenment's failure on the individual level, and Jane creates a wholly personal moral and religious system.

Hodge, Jon
Compulsory Education
SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 - Volume 45, Number 4, Autumn 2005, pp. 899-916
Abstract
This essay details how the narrator of Charlotte Brontë's Villette, Lucy Snowe, crafts her narrative by relying on the structure of obsession's pathology while not falling victim to its symptoms. In this way, Lucy not only finds her authorial voice, but also offers an alternative treatment for obsession, one in which the obsessed person need not renounce the compulsion to obsess (which may be impossible), but instead encourages her to express that obsession in a more culturally and personally productive fashion.

Godfrey, Esther
Jane Eyre, from Governess to Girl Bride
SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 - Volume 45, Number 4, Autumn 2005, pp. 853-871
Abstract
Gendered identities in Jane Eyre are inseparable from Jane's working-class affiliations and from her role as a young wife to an older husband. Class and age complicate readings of masculinity and femininity in the text; and as governess and as "girl-bride," Jane evokes nineteenth-century notions of androgyny and female masculinity, effectively using what are often interpreted as her subservient positions to her advantage. Though Charlotte Brontë avoids simplistic power reversals, the novel suggests possibilities for gender subversion within a seemingly normative romance narrative.

Categories: Journals, Scholar, Jane_Eyre, Villette, Charlotte_Brontë