Recent Talks

Recent Brontë-related talks around:

3 May 2011 12:15 pm - 01:30 pm
Griffith University, South Brisbane, Australia
Wuthering Heights: a fragment of a case of psychoanalytic history
by Stephen Horton

N55 Room 1.12

This seminar reports textual interpretations from:

“A perfect misanthropist’s heaven: and Mr Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us ... ‘Wuthering’ being a significant adjective descriptive of the atmospheric tumult ... Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times.”
Stephen Horton is a member of the Urban Research Program. His analytical work has increasingly taken the form of picture reading and writing.

April 16, 2011
Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities
Loyola University Chicago · Lake Shore Campus, Chicago, IL
Thackeray and Brontë - Day Conference

Crown Center, Rm 530
Sponsored by The Martin J. Svaglic Chair in Textual Studies

1:00 "The Writing on the (Dungeon) Wall: Reading Wuthering Heights by the Light of Brontë's Poems", Micael Clarke, Assoc. Professor of English, Loyola University Chicago
2:00 "The Moral of Wuthering Heights", Marianne Thormählen, Professor of English Studies, Lund University, Sweden

Undergraduate Conference in Literature
April 8, 2011
Department of English
Cathedral of Learning

11:30 AM–12:30 PM


Courtship and Marriage: The Brontës’ Social Critique through Literature
Room 501
Katie Doyle: “Your Space or Mine? Navigating Desire in Agnes Grey”
Rebecca DePoe: “‘That They May Be One As We Are One’: Catholicism, Protestantism and the Duality of Reason versus Imagination in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette”
Megan Roth: “Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: Feminist Critique of the Female Position and Marriage Laws in Nineteenth-Century England”

The Folklore Society, AGM Conference 2010 "The Supernatural"
Friday 26 to Sunday 28 March, Leeds Trinity University College, Horsforth

Ariella Feldman (University of Birmingham),
Jane Eyre: Fairy and Witch Power—A Study of Gender
In my current analysis of allusion to eight types of folklore in Charlotte Brontë’s (1816-1855) creative literature, I study the inter-relationship between popular belief and customary consciousness and gender in her novel, Jane Eyre (1847). She addresses the problems inherent in Victorian patriarchy by devising a code or system; the fairy and witch motif are symbolic of female power and as such are seen to subvert narrow cultural definitions of Victorian femininity. In their construction as beings living apart from the control of fathers and husbands and the indirect control of organised patriarchy or paternalism, Brontë creates a feminised literary landscape. Furthermore, the novel’s use of folklore appears to invert conventional gender relations as the hero identifies the heroine as fairy/witch. Hence, literary folklore contributes to Brontë feminist critical readings of rebellion against the ‘separate spheres ideology’ characterising mid-Victorian society. In this paper, I firstly, provide an overview (or the context) of my thesis and the secondly, proceed with a broad analysis of Brontë’s treatment of gender from a folklore perspective. For this analysis I outline Brontë’s methodology: source material is drawn from both literary tradition and her local cultural world. I briefly consider her reliance on folklore for her study of gender consciousness across her fiction and then argue for a more radical treatment of fairy and witch feminisation in Jane Eyre.

Categories: Scholar, Talks