A Brontë Bestiary and Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time

A couple of recent thesis published by LAP Lambert Academic Publishing:

A Brontë Bestiary: The Moral Function of Animals in Agnes Grey, Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights
Caryl Casson
ISBN-10: 3838351053
ISBN-13: 978-3838351056
April 12, 2010
Pages: 92

Contrary to the enduring myth that the Brontë sisters led lives of isolation, they were in fact acutely aware of contemporary events. These included important developments in human and animal welfare. In their three greatest works, each sister uses animals to comment on the morality of her characters. In Agnes Grey, the treatment of animals is a reliable compass to the devout religiosity and uncomplicated morality of good people. Although clearly a lover of animals, Anne Brontë shows her characters' animalistic tendencies and associations in a negative light. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre uses animals in a more complex way. In the novel, man's similarity to animals is not portrayed as necessarily bad, but it is each main character's ability, or lack thereof, to master his animal instincts that acts as an indicator of morality. Meanwhile, in Wuthering Heights the barriers between man and animal break down, allowing Emily Brontë to call into question polite society's belief in its own superiority to other life on earth, be it human or animal.

An Application of Gérard Genette's Theory in Character Analysis: Wuthering Heights by Brontë and A Hero of Our Time by Lermontov
Günel Hacizade
ISBN-10: 3838334337
ISBN-13: 978-3838334332
March 22, 2010
Pages: 108

The book makes a comparative analysis of the Russian novelist Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time and the English Novelist Emily Bronté's Wuthering Heights in the light of the narratological model introduced by Gérard Genette in Narrative Discourse. Through an analysis of the narrative methods employed in both novels, the study offers a discussion of the characterization of the protagonists, Pechorin and Heathcliff, who belong to different cultures and whose stories have nothing in common, and shows how similar narrative strategies used in both novels play an active role in the formation of similar character traits. Pechorin and Heathcliff are complex characters inspiring contradictory feelings, which is possible due to the complex narrative mechanism of the novels. The book presents the narratological analysis to decipher the narrative codes that render the protagonists similar, and to reveal the impact of the methods on the reader's reactions to the protagonists. The study should be useful and interesting for the specialists of literature who are interested in character analyses and/or narratological survey.

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