Scholar and personal notes

The googles do nothing posts about the recent Book Life - Print Culture and the Public Sphere Conference at Malmö University (March 20-22). The plenary speaker was Nancy Armstrong with a talk entitled How Novels Think: The Limits of British Individualism from 1719-1900:

Gender was precisely that "Norm" which connects Disciplinarity and Biopower: they converge and overlap on the spongey terrain of sexuality. Drawing examples from Jane Eyre, she traces out how the ostensibly class-centric power dynamic shown was actually intricately linked to gender at every point in the text where classes come into conflict. It takes, Armstrong notes twenty pages for Brontë to get her character Jane Eyre from the rainy outside to the warm inside of the Parsonage. Gender lets us understand this struggle to enter the privileged domestic space better than the obvious class problematic. Hannah, the female housekeeper tries to prevent Jane from entering the parsonage, while the master eventually overrules his domestic servant and admits Jane into the house. This "masculine right to include others" shows for Armstrong the prevalent gendering of class conflict at work within Victorian literature.

The Little Professor discusses Sarah Blake's Grange House:

Sarah Blake, the author of Grange House (2000), is a Victorianist, and this neo-Victorian novel might well be taken as a rethinking of all those debates over the meaning of both literary foremothers and female authorship. Grange House does not rewrite Victorian texts per se, although the novel alludes (explicitly and otherwise) to Charlotte Bronte, Henry James, Lord Tennyson, among others. Similarly, while the novel harps on a number of Gothic themes and structures--ghosts, incest, repetition--it cannot be pinned down to any Gothic precursor in particular.

Of Books and Bicycles has an interesting post about Wuthering Heights:

(...) This time around what I’m noticing is the novel’s complicated structure. I find the love story, well, not much of a love story. It’s a story less about love than about deranged, violent compulsion. These characters don’t love; they go crazy with obsession. But the structure is worth looking at closely, both in terms of narrative form and in the pairing and repetition of characters, places, and action (...)

an eudæmonist writes a very nice description of a (peripatetic) summer reading of Jane Eyre. Winged Ink posts about Anne Carson's The Glass Essay (and its Emily Brontë references).

Finally, on a more personal note: Justine Picardie publishes a quite moving post where the Brontës, specifically Branwell and Charlotte, are present. By the way, the author of Daphne will be at dovegreyreader's blog for a few days and the Devon blogger writes a lovely post about this that you can't possibly ignore.

EDIT: Via this comment on dovegreyreader, we have found that Justine Picardie's interview in Sky Arts's The Book Show is online.

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, Scholar, Talks, Wuthering Heights