Existentialist Vagina

Two new scholar books with Brontë-related content:

Towards a New Literary Humanism
Edited by Andy Mousley
Palgrave Macmillan
08 Feb 2011
ISBN: 9780230238152

This ground-breaking book critically reinvigorates the tradition of asking literature to speak to the question of what it is to be human. It demonstrates how literature can expand and challenge us emotionally, cognitively and ethically, and how a literary education contributes to the cultivation of 'deep selves', where 'deep' means (amongst other things): self-aware, sensitive to emotional complexity, and concerned with fundamental questions about life. The Introduction re-conceptualises the past and present meaning of humanism within literary studies, and outlines a critical vocabulary which identifies the nature of literature's human appeal and significance. Engaging with sceptical, posthumanist perspectives, the essays themselves demonstrate how the new literary humanism and posthumanism work in practice, across a bracing range of writers and genres, including Sophocles, Shakespeare, George Eliot, Anne Brontë, nineteenth-century socialist fiction, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Musil, Virginia Woolf, Jo Shapcott, Michel Houellebecq, twentieth-century horse-whispering narratives, and contemporary poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Brontë essay is Faith, Feeling, Reality: Anne Brontë as an Existentialist Poet by R. Styler

And

The Female Body in Medicine and Literature
Ed. Mangham, Andrew & Depledge, Greta
ISBN 9781846314728
University of Liverpool Press
08 Feb 2011

This collection explores the complex intersections between literature and the medical treatment of women between 1600 and 2000. It will be the first single volume to fully analyse the impact of women’s surgery on literary production and, conversely, ways in which literary trends have shaped the course of gynaecology and other branches of women’s medicine.The interdisciplinary essays underscore how popular art forms have served an important function in the formation of ‘women’s science’ prior to the twenty-first century. The book also demonstrates how a number of high-profile medical controversies were taken up and reworked by novelists, philosophers, and historians. Focusing on the vexed and convoluted story of women’s medicine, this volume offers new ways of thinking about gender, science, and the Western imagination.

The Brontë-related chapter has a title not to be forgotten:
Narrating the Victorian Vagina: Charlotte Brontë and the Masturbating Woman by  Emma L. E. Rees

Categories: Books, Scholar