Brontë for kids

Some time ago, we pointed out some articles about how to teach the Brontës nowadays. The subject is motivating some scholar research. Besides the already mentioned publications we now present you with this one, also recently published:

Brontë for kids
Kelly Hager
Children's Literature Association Quarterly 30.3 (2005) 314-332
In this essay I want to focus on a handful of novels that together comprise a curious subgenre: novels for children (and, in particular, novels for adolescent girls) in which the protagonists imagine themselves into the Brontës' lives and fictions: novels that appropriate the plots of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The History of the Young Men, and novels which represent adolescence by inserting their juvenile heroes and heroines into the plots of the heavily-mythologized biographies of Emily and Branwell. In looking back to the Brontës, these writers of twentieth-century children's novels find ways to plot the passage between childhood and maturity and strategies for narrating the force of an emerging sexuality. This essay, then, seeks to redefine the role and function of the quixotic in novels for children and young adults, and in redefining the quixotic, it also reveals the crucial role the Brontës' fictions (and the fictions we have made out of their lives) play in our twentieth and twenty-first century understanding of adolescence and adolescent sexuality.

Subjects:

• Clarke, Pauline, 1921- Return of the Twelves.
• Gardam, Jane. Summer after the funeral.
• Greenwald, Sheila. It all began with Jane Eyre: or, The secret life of Franny Dillman.
• Calhoun, Mary. Katie John and Heathcliff.
• Swindells, Robert E., 1939- Follow a shadow.
• Books and reading in literature.
• Brontë, Emily, 1818-1848 -- Influence.
• Brontë, Charlotte, 1816-1855 -- Influence.

Curiously enough, recently Brontëana showed us a beautiful comic series "The Brontës-Infernal Angria#1" (more pictures here, here, and review, review, and interview , which could be included perfectly in the scope of this paper). The second issue of the series is scheduled for early 2006, but it has not appeared yet. It will be called "The Brontës at war".

The paper also seems not to mention "Brief Candle", another book about the same subject that we covered some time ago.

Categories: Journals, Scholar, Comics