The Parsonage and the Arctic

Recent scholar books with a Brontë twist:

Writer's Houses and the Making of Memory
by Harald Hendrix (editor)
Series: Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies
Routledge (Taylor & Francis Ltd)

ISBN: 9780415957427
ISBN-10: 0415957427
Publication Date: 11/15/2007
Pages: 296

This innovative new book examines the ways in which writers' houses contribute to the making of memory. It shows that houses built or inhabited by poets and novelists both reflect and construct the author's private and artistic persona; it also demonstrates how this materialized process of self-fashioning is subsequently appropriated within various strategies and policies of cultural memory.

Chapter 7 is entitled Myth and Memory: Reading the Brontë Parsonage by Christine Alexander.

White Horizon
The Arctic in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination
by Jen Hill
SUNY Press
SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

$60.00 Hardcover - 238 pages
Release Date: January 2008
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-7229-3

Bridging historical and literary studies, White Horizon explores the importance of the Arctic to British understandings of masculine identity, the nation, and the rapidly expanding British Empire in the nineteenth century. Well before Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, polar space had come to represent the limit of both empire and human experience. Using a variety of texts, from explorers’ accounts to boys’ adventure fiction, as well as provocative and fresh readings of the works of Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Wilkie Collins, Jen Hill illustrates the function of Arctic space in the nineteenth-century British social imagination, arguing that the desolate north was imagined as a “pure” space, a conveniently blank page on which to write narratives of Arctic exploration that both furthered and critiqued British imperialism.

Chapter 4 is entitled A Pale Blank of Mist and Cloud: Arctic Spaces in Jane Eyre.

Categories: Books, Scholar