Pedagogy and Feminist Practice

More recent scholar papers:

A New Servitude’: Pedagogy and Feminist Practice in Brontë’s Jane Eyre
Kirstin Hanley, SUNY Fredonia
Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies
Issue 5.3 (Winter 2009)

In its deployment of a variety of generic forms and strategies—romance, gothic, bildungsroman—Jane Eyre is representative of numerous eighteenth and nineteenth-century textual traditions, and as Gilbert and Gubar have remarked, also accessible to readers, as “we tend today to think of Jane Eyre as…the archetypal scenario for all those mildly thrilling romantic encounters between a scowling Byronic hero (who owns a gloomy mansion) and a trembling heroine (who can’t quite figure out the mansion’s floor plan)”. Yet, despite a growing interest in how didacticism shaped the reading public of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the acknowledged pervasiveness of advice books specifically addressed to female audiences, there has been no attempt to explore how didactic traditions influenced mid- nineteenth-century novels like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Scenes of women teaching and learning comprise a substantial portion of Jane Eyre’s action and function to shape the terms of its discourse, but these scenes are generally overlooked in the interests of emphasizing Jane’s escape from this servitude, an escape associated with the novel’s influential portrayal of feminist individualism. (Read more)

And some recent reviews of Brontë-related books:

The Brontës in the World of the Arts (review)
Kathleen A. Miller
Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature
Volume 28, Number 1, Spring 2009, pp. 195-197

The Brontes in the World of the Arts (Review)
Pamela Gerrish Nunn
Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies
Vol 14, No 1 (2009), pp. 45-46

Imperialism, Reform, and the Making of Englishness in Jane Eyre (review)
Annette M. Van
Victorian Studies
Volume 51, Number 4, Summer 2009, pp. 753-754

Categories: Journals, Scholar