Gothic and Persephone

A couple of books with Brontë content:

York Notes Companions Gothic Literature
Susan Chaplin
Jul 2011, Paperback, 328 pages
Pearson Education Limited
ISBN13: 9781408266663
ISBN10: 1408266660

An exploration of Gothic literature from its origins in Horace Walpole's 1764 classic The Castle of Otranto, through Romantic and Victorian Gothic to modernist and postmodernist takes on the form. The volume surveys key debates such as Female Gothic, the Gothic narrator and nation and empire, and focuses on a wide range of texts including The Mysteries of Udolpho, Frankenstein,Jane Eyre, Dracula,The Magic Toyshop and The Shining. 

Part III contains the section Nineteenth-century Gothic: Emily Brontë, Poe, Collins and Stevenson.

The Myth of Persephone in Girls' Fantasy Literature
Holly Blackford
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published 25th August 2011
Routledge – 248 pages
Series: Children's Literature and Culture

In this book, Blackford historicizes the appeal of the Persephone myth in the nineteenth century and traces figurations of Persephone, Demeter, and Hades throughout girls’ literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She illuminates developmental patterns and anxieties in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Nutcracker and Mouse King, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, and Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. The story of the young goddess’s separation from her mother and abduction into the underworld is, at root, an expression of ambivalence about female development, expressed in the various Neverlands through which female protagonists cycle and negotiate a partial return to earth. The myth conveys the role of female development in the perpetuation and renewal of humankind, coordinating natural and cultural orders through a hieros gamos (fertility coupling) rite. Meanwhile, popular novels such as Twilight and Coraline are paradoxically fresh because they recycle goddesses from myths as old as the seasons. With this book, Blackford offers a consideration of how literature for the young squares with broader canons, how classics flexibly and uniquely speak through novels that enjoy broad appeal, and how female traditions are embedded in novels by both men and women.

Chapter 4 is: Lost Girls, Underworld Queens in J. M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy (1911) and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847)