Dickinson and Rhys

Recently published scholarship

Gary Lee Stonum
Emily's Heathcliff: Metaphysical Love in Dickinson and Brontë
The Emily Dickinson Journal - Volume 20, Number 1, 2011, pp. 22-33

Abstract:

Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights and Emily Dickinson throughout her writing both imagine romantic love in an extreme form, one belonging to the literary tradition studied by Denis de Rougemont and characterized by René Girard as metaphysical. The intensity of such love is measured and usually enhanced by the obstacles it faces from social and religious authority. Like Heathcliff and Catherine's, Dickinson's lovers find their very being in one another, but when they are separated by death the survivor can only yearn for a reunion in the afterlife. Brontë explicitly and Dickinson suggestively but less consistently imagine this reunion as the resumption of a childhood experience at once edenic and rebellious. The result in both writers is a three-part narrative arc: childhood bliss, adult separation and agony, sublime reunion.

Shakti Jaising
Who is Christophine?: The Good Black Servant and the Contradictions of (Racial) Liberalism
MFS Modern Fiction Studies - Volume 56, Number 4, Winter 2010, pp. 815-836

In a special PMLA issue on “Comparative Racialization,” Shu-Mei Shih argues that “Even though South Asia-based postcolonial theory has geared us to the study of colonialism and its consequent postcolonial complexities, it has also long held a strongly ambivalent relation to race studies” (1347). Whether or not we agree with Shih’s characterization of the ambivalence toward race studies within “South Asia-based postcolonial theory,” her essay correctly points to an unfortunate divide between scholarship on race and postcoloniality. Aiming to bridge this divide, this paper revisits an ongoing debate among postcolonial scholars on the racial politics of a celebrated anticolonial text, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. Although a beneficiary of this debate, I argue that what is missing from the conversation is a more robust engagement with the limits and contradictions of Wide Sargasso Sea’s liberalism. By reading Rhys’s 1966 novel...

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