The Marriage of Telegraphic Minds

Two recent scholar Stanford University Press publications with Brontë connections:

The Marriage of Minds
Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot
by Rachel Ablow

Stanford University Press
2007
248 pp.
ISBN-10: 0804754667
ISBN-13: 9780804754668

The Marriage of Minds examines the implications of the common Victorian claim that novel reading can achieve the psychic, ethical, and affective benefits also commonly associated with sympathy in married life. Through close readings of canonical texts in relation to the histories of sympathy, marriage, and reading, The Marriage of Minds begins to fill a long-standing gap between eighteenth-century philosophical notions of sympathy and twentieth-century psychoanalytic concepts of identification. It examines the wide variety of ways in which novels were understood to educate or reform readers in the mid-nineteenth century. Finally, it demonstrates how both the form of the Victorian novel and the experience supposed to result from that form were implicated in ongoing debates about the nature, purpose, and law of marriage.

Chapter Two is entitled, The 'Failure' of Wuthering Heights.

Telegraphic Realism
Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems
by Richard Menke

Stanford University Press
2007
336 pp.
10 illustrations.
ISBN-10: 0804756910
ISBN-13: 9780804756914

Menke's Telegraphic Realism is the first comprehensive reading of Victorian fiction as part of an emerging world of new media technologies and information exchange. The book analyzes the connections between fictional writing, communication technologies, and developing ideas about information, from the postage stamp and electric telegraph to wireless. By placing fiction in dialogue with media history, it argues that Victorian realism was print culture’s sophisticated response to the possibilities and dilemmas of a world of media innovations and information flows.

Chapter 2 is entitled Electric Information and contains a section, A Shock of Recognition, where Jane Eyre is discussed.

Categories: Books, Scholar