How to Read Jane Eyre

Blackwell Publishing has recently published a relevant book for the readers of this blog:

How to Read the Victorian Novel
by George Levine (Rutgers University)

Series: How to Study Literature
ISBN: 9781405130561
ISBN10: 1405130563

USA: Nov 2007
Rest of World: Oct 2007
Australia: Dec 2007
200 pages

How to Read the Victorian Novel provides a unique introduction to the genre. Using examples from the classics, like The Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, The Woman in White, and Middlemarch, it demonstrates just how unfamiliar their familiarity is. The book attempts to break free of the sense that the Victorian novel is somehow old fashioned, moralizing, and formally careless by emphasizing the complexity, difficulty, and rare pleasures of the Victorian writers' strenuous efforts both to entertain and to teach; to create serious "art" and to appeal to wide audiences; to respond both to the demands of publishing and also to their own rich imaginative engagement with a world heading into modernity at full speed.

Broad in its scope, the text surveys a wide variety of literary types and explores the cultural and historical developments of the novel form itself. The book also poses a series of "big questions" pertaining to money, capitalism, industry, race, gender, and, at the same time, to formal issues, such as plotting, perspective, and realist representation. In addition, it locates the qualities that give to the great variety of Victorian novels a "family resemblance," the material conditions of their production, their tendency to multiply plots, their obsession with class and money, their problematic handling of gender questions, and their commitment to realist representation.

How to Read the Victorian Novel challenges our comfortable expectations of the genre in order to explore intensively a burgeoning and changing literary form which mirrors a burgeoning and changing society.

Chapter 4 is particularly related to Jane Eyre:

4. Jane, David, and the Bildungsroman

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, Scholar, Victorian Era