Beowulf and Novel Violence

Some recently published books with Brontë content:

Beowulf on the Beach
What to Love and What to Skip in Literature's 50 Greatest Hits
Jack Murnighan
Random House

# Format: Trade Paperback, 384 pages
# On Sale: May 19, 2009
# Price: $15.00
# ISBN: 978-0-307-40957-7 (0-307-40957-0)

Feel bad about not reading or not enjoying the so-called great books? Don’t sweat it, it’s not your fault. Did anyone tell you that Anna Karenina is a beach read, that Dickens is hilarious, that the Iliad’s battle scenes rival Hollywood’s for gore, or that Joyce is at his best when he’s talking about booze, sex, or organ meats?
Writer and professor Jack Murnighan says it’s time to give literature another look, but this time you’ll enjoy yourself. With a little help, you’ll see just how great the great books are: how they can make you laugh, moisten your eyes, turn you on, and leave you awestruck and deeply moved. Beowulf on the Beach is your field guide–erudite, witty, and fun-loving–for helping you read and relish fifty of the biggest (and most skipped) classics of all time. For each book, Murnighan reveals how to get the most out of your reading and provides a crib sheet that includes the Buzz, the Best Line, What’s Sexy, and What to Skip.

The book includes two sections devoted to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights

Novel Violence
A Narratography of Victorian Fiction
Stewart Garrett
280 pages,
ISBN: 9780226774589
Published May 2009

Victorian novels, Garrett Stewart argues, hurtle forward in prose as violent as the brutal human existence they chronicle. In Novel Violence, he explains how such language assaults the norms of written expression and how, in doing so, it counteracts the narratives it simultaneously propels.
Immersing himself in the troubling plots of Charles Dickens, Anne Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, Stewart uses his brilliant new method of narratography to trace the microplots of language as they unfold syllable by syllable. By pinpointing where these linguistic narratives collide with the stories that give them context, he makes a powerful case for the centrality of verbal conflict to the experience of reading Victorian novels. He also maps his finely wrought argument on the spectrum of influential theories of the novel—including those of Georg Lukács and Ian Watt—and tests it against Edgar Allan Poe’s antinovelistic techniques. In the process, Stewart shifts critical focus toward the grain of narrative and away from more abstract analyses of structure or cultural context, revealing how novels achieve their semantic and psychic effects and unearthing, in prose, something akin to poetry.

The chapter on Anne Brontë is: Mind Frames. Anne Brontë’s Exchange Economy.

Finally, we mention the republishing of Elizabeth Longford's Eminent Victorian Women (first published in 1981):

Eminent Victorian Women by Elizabeth Longford
# ISBN: 0750948876
# ISBN-13: 9780750948876
# Format: Paperback, 240pp
# Publisher: The History Press
# Pub. Date: May 2009

Elizabeth Longford has chosen a group of Victorian women who, in their actions or writing, challenged the repressive rules of established society. They include Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, whose cloistered lives were illuminated by the vividness of their creative genius; Josephine Butler, who brought about the end of the infamous Contagious Diseases Acts; Annie Besant, who campaigned vigorously for the rights of women subject to unreasonable husbands or harsh employers; Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin brought the cruelties of slavery to the world’s attention; and James Barry, born Margaret Bulkley, medical reformer and arguably the first British female to qualify as a suregon. This is a fascinating account of a crucial period of struggle for women’s rights and of some of the remarkable personalities who took part.

Categories: Books, Scholar