Scholar Brontë overview

A selection of recent Brontë-related published papers and talks:

Article: Imagination, Materiality and the Act of Writing in Emily Brontë’s Diary Papers
Author: Marsden, Simon (Lancaster University)
Source: Nineteenth-Century Contexts ( Volume 28, Number 1, March 2006, pp. 35-47) Special Issue: Victorian Life Writing).
No abstract available.

Article: Literary Biomythography
Author: Benton, Michael
Source: Auto/Biography, Volume 13, Number 3, December 2005, pp. 206-226(21)
Abstract: Myth-making is endemic in the life histories of novelists and poets. Literary biographies are complicit in the process even when they seek to demythologize their subjects. This article outlines a five-phase development in the Brontë myth as the paradigm of 'biomythography. Life writings about Byron, Dickens and Sylvia Plath are then shown to follow a similar pattern and to exemplify, respectively, the characteristics of celebrity, idolatry and martyrdom that typify myth-making and which literary biography both helps to create and attempts to expose.
The article can be read here.

Article: Choseville: Brontë’s Villette and the Art of Bourgeois Interiority
Author: Badowska, Eva
Source: PMLA, Volume 120, Number 5, 1 October 2005, pp. 1509-1523(15)
Abstract: The essay argues that Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) grapples with the role of things in the constitution of persons. It is a paradigmatic novel about the fortunes of private, psychological interiority under commodity culture; its immediate context is the empire of things after the Great Exhibition of 1851. Villette represents subjectivity as a cabinet of curiosities, an interior—like a parlor—filled with intensely meaningful, even fetishized, bibelots. Lucy, the novel’s narrator, longs to retreat from the public spectacles of commodity culture but, ironically, finds her identity also through relations with things. The novel suggests that bourgeois subjectivity, though it points to a thorough intimacy with objects, is paradoxically defined by the nostalgic notion that true interiority has been beset by or even lost to the pressure of things.

Other recent papers:
"Mrs. Darling's Scream: The Rites of Persephone in Wuthering Heights and Peter and Wendy." Studies in the Humanities (Winter 2006) by Holly V. Blackford.

In The Journal of American Culture (Volume 29 Page 52 - March 2006) we found I Was a Teenage Classic: Literary Adaptation in Turn-of-the-Millennium Teen Films by Hugh H. Davis. There the MTV's Wuthering Heights version is mentioned.

Talks:

Society of Italian Studies Post-Graduate Colloquium
3 June 2006, Bristol University

Barry Ryan (Cork): ‘Something like Yorkshire’: Beppe Fenoglio and Wuthering Heights

2006 INCS (Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies) Conference. "Conflicts"
31 March-1 April. Rutgers University.
Dinah Birch (University of Liverpool) "Power and Conflict: Charlotte Brontë in the Schoolroom"
Wendy A. Lee (Princeton University) “On Never Having to Say You’re Sorry: Imperial Romance and Jane Eyre”
Vlasta Vranjes (University of California, Berkeley) “Charlotte Brontë’s England, Charlotte Brontë’s Women: Catholic or Protestant, Cosmopolitan or National?”

Categories: Journals, Scholar, Talks