Romantic, Giving Women

Two new scholar books with Brontë content:

Romantics and Victorians
Nicola J. Watson and Shafquat Towheed
Publication Date: November 2011
Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN: 9781849666244 (paperback)
9781849666237 (hardback)

The second volume in the Reading and Studying Literature series, co-published with the Open University, introduces students to European romanticism and Victorian culture. Each period is discussed in terms of an overarching theme, providing a clear focus for study and discussion and introducing readers to an important theoretical concept in literary studies. European romanticism is approached through a consideration of the evolution of the idea of the romantic author and the romantic inner life, using readings from Wordsworth on Grasmere, Shelley lyric poetry and Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater. The book goes on to explore Victorian culture through a reading of ideas of 'home' and 'abroad', in the work of Emily Brontë, Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson. The featured theoretical concept of this volume is 'the author'.

Contains: Part 2: Home and abroad in the Victorian age, c. 1832-1901: Wuthering Heights (1847) | Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four (1890) | Robert Louis Stevenson, 'The Beach of Falesa' (1892-3)

Giving WomenAlliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture
Jill Rappoport
OUP USA
978-0-19-977260-5 | Hardback | 05 January 2012

Giving Women examines the literary expression and cultural consequences of English women's giving from the 1820s to the First World War. Attending to the dynamic action and reaction of gift exchange in fiction and poetry by Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Christina Rossetti as well as in literary annuals, Salvation Army periodicals, and political pamphlets, Rappoport demonstrates how female authors and fictional protagonists alike mobilized networks outside of marriage and the market. Through giving, women redefined the primary allegiances of their everyday lives, forged public coalitions, and advanced campaigns for abolition, slum reform, eugenics, and suffrage.

Contains:
Chapter 2 Fictions of Reciprocity in Jane Eyre and Aurora Leigh
I. Jane's Inheritance
II. "An[other] Undowered Orphan"
III. Blind Economies