Free Trade Feelings

Two scholar new books with Brontë-related content:

“Affective Worlds”
Writing, Feeling and Nineteenth-Century Literature
John Hughes
Sussex Academic Press
Hardback
ISBN: 978-1-84519-442-0
June 2011

This book offers an original approach to a number of nineteenth-century authors in terms of what are seen as the constitutive affective dynamics of their work. Pursuing theoretically and philosophically informed close readings, John Hughes emphasizes issues of the embodied mind in literary texts, and explores the inventive and discriminating powers of thought – as well as the projections of identity and relatedness – staged and expressed by imaginative writing in the ‘long nineteenth-century’. Within each chapter a writer is seen as investigating the physical or emotional determinants of mind, as well as the social conditions of subjectification, through the figurative, dramatic and subjective means of their art.
… The individual author chapters examine a singular, exemplary, instance of how acts of mind, and moments of self-awareness, are generated from emotional or physical response: musical experience in Blake; the recreational activity of walking in Wordsworth; fantasies of resentment in Poe; moments or modes of cross-gender, feminine, identification in Tennyson; bodily sensation, and self-separation, in Charlotte Brontë; eye contact and looking in Hardy. In each case, the exampled texts from these authors and poets display an affective or physical inspiration. Hughes draws on themes of ethical subjectivity in the work of Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze to provide essential reading for all those involved in nineteenth-century literature.

The chapter on Charlotte Brontë is “I Love”, “I Hate”, “I Suffer”’: Feeling, Subjectivity, and Form in Charlotte Brontë’s Fiction.

Romances of Free Trade
British Literature, Laissez-Faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century
Ayse Celikkol
OUP USA
304 pages | 235x156mm
978-0-19-976900-1 | Hardback | 11 August 2011
Romances of Free Trade offers a new account of the cultural work of romance in nineteenth-century Britain. Çelikkol argues that novelists and playwrights employed this genre to represent a radically new historical formation: the emergence of the global free-market economy. In previous centuries, the British state had pursued an economic policy that privileged domestic goods over foreign ones. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, liberal economists maintained that commodity traffic across national borders should move outside the purview of the state, and their position gained increasing support. Amid economic transformation, Britons pondered the effects of vertiginous circulation. Would patriotic attachment to the homeland dissolve along with the preference for domestic goods? What would be the fate of the nation and the empire if commerce were uncontrollable? The literary genre of romance, characterized by protagonists who drift in lawless spaces, played a privileged role in addressing such pressing questions. From the figure of the smuggler to episodic plot structure, romance elements in fiction and drama narrated sprawling global markets and the fluidity of capital. Exploring works by Walter Scott, Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and their lesser-known contemporaries, this book historicizes globalization as it traces the sense of dissolving borders and the perceived decline of national sovereignty back into the nineteenth century.

The chapter on Charlotte Brontë is 6. Mutuality, Marriage, and Charlotte Brontë's Free Traders.

Categories: Books, Scholar