Commodity for Swashbucklers

Two new scholar books with Brontë content:

Women, Love, and Commodity Culture in British Romanticism
Daniela Garofalo, The University of Oklahoma, USA
Imprint: Ashgate
Published: April 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4094-4101-4

Offering a new understanding of canonical Romanticism, Daniela Garofalo suggests that representations of erotic love in the period have been largely misunderstood. Commonly understood as a means for transcending political and economic realities, love, for several canonical Romantic writers, offers, instead, a contestation of those realities. Garofalo argues that Romantic writers show that the desire for transcendence through love mimics the desire for commodity consumption and depends on the same dynamic of delayed fulfillment that was advocated by thinkers such as Adam Smith. As writers such as William Blake, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, John Keats, and Emily Brontë engaged with the period's concern with political economy and the nature of desire, they challenged stereotypical representations of women either as self-denying consumers or as intemperate participants in the market economy. Instead, their works show the importance of women for understanding modern economics, with women's desire conceived as a force that not only undermines the political economy's emphasis on productivity, growth, and perpetual consumption, but also holds forth the possibility of alternatives to a system of capitalist exchange.

Chapter 7 is devoted to Wuthering Heights: Impossible Love and Commodity Culture in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

Pirates and Mutineers of the Nineteenth CenturySwashbucklers and Swindlers
Edited by Grace Moore, The University of Melbourne, Australia
Imprint: Ashgate
Published: March 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7546-6433-8

The first volume devoted to literary pirates in the nineteenth century, this collection examines changes in the representation of the pirate from the beginning of the nineteenth century through the late Victorian period. Gone were the dangerous ruffians of the eighteenth-century novel and in their place emerged a set of brooding and lovable rogues, as exemplified by Byron's Corsair. As the contributors engage with acts of piracy by men and women in the literary marketplace as well as on the high seas, they show that both forms were foundational in the promotion and execution of Britain's imperial ambitions. Linking the pirate's development as a literary figure with the history of piracy and the making of the modern state tells us much about race, class, and evolving gender relationships. While individual chapters examine key texts like Treasure Island, Dickens's 1857 'mutiny' story in Household Words, and Peter Pan, the collection as a whole interrogates the growth of pirate myths and folklore throughout the nineteenth century and the depiction of their nautical heirs in contemporary literature and culture.

Includes the section Playing pirate; real and imaginary angrias in Branwell Brontë's writing by Joetta Harty.