From Revenge to Ludic Economies

Recent scholar work:

A couple of talks in a ongoing conference taking place in Oxford:

1st Global Conference
Revenge. A Persons Project
Thursday 15th July 2010 – Saturday 17th July 2010
Mansfield College, Oxford

Session 1: Revenge Literature
Chair: Stephen Banks

• The Servant as Nemesis in Wuthering Heights by Esra Melikoglu

• A Path to Dead End: An Exploration on Revenge in Wuthering Heights by Kuo-Ping Claudia Tai

And several new scholar papers:

Julia D. Kent
"Making the Prude" in Charlotte Brontë's Villette
Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas - Volume 8, Number 2, June 2010, pp. 325-339

Abstract:
This essay explores one version of a recurring pattern in the Victorian novel, the tendency to compare English and French models of national character. While many novelists, including Charlotte Brontë, portray French women as possessing an immoral theatricality, and deploying deceptive "public" personae that contrast with the Englishwoman's devotion to her national and domestic homes, Brontë's Villette endows French theater with the power to question British national gender ideals.

Kathleen Ann Miller
Haunted Heroines: The Gothic Imagination and the Female Bildungsromane of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and L. M. Montgomery
The Lion and the Unicorn - Volume 34, Number 2, April 2010, pp. 125-147

Using its popular competition "The Great Wednesday Compare," John Mutford's literary online discussion forum "The Book Mine Set" posted a challenge in 2007, asking readers to vote on whether Jane Austen or L. M. Montgomery, best known for her canonical children's classic Anne of Green Gables (AGG), was their favorite author. One blogger responded, "Wow, I'm really surprised at the number of people picking Montgomery over Austen! Although L. M. Montgomery has a huge place in my heart, I'm going to have to vote for Jane again. . . . It makes me sad not to be able to vote for Montgomery, which I would have done if she'd been up against almost anyone else." Many bloggers offered similar sentiments; the "Sophie's choice" of selecting between Montgomery and Austen proved, for many, almost too much to bear.2 By examining message...

Brian Olszewski
Ludic Economies of Wuthering Heights
Journal of Narrative Theory, Volume 40, Number 1, Winter 2010
"I have said nothing about Wuthering Heights because that astonishing work seems to me a kind of sport." R. F. Leavis, The Great Tradition

In explaining why he says "nothing" about Wuthering Heights in The Great Tradition, Leavis actually gestures toward saying much more than he supposes. While the novel may become a sport by breaking with Victorian novelistic conventions as he suggests, Leavis encroaches upon a reading of the novel that has yet to receive serious attention in its critical tradition, namely the role that play assumes as an important narrative economy in it. Although Johann Huizinga writes how the nineteenth century "had lost many of the play-elements so characteristic of former ages", it has become clear in recent years that the Victorians not so much lost the element or desire for play. Rather the Victorian era witnessed the restructuring of traditional and popular play activities and the introduction of new forms of play as a result of industrialism and the cementation of cities as cultural centers...

Categories: Journals, Scholar, Talks