Romance and Postcripts

Two new scholar books with Brontë-related content:

Women Writers and the Hero of Romance
Judith Wilt
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781137426970
June 2014

What does the heroine seek from the hero in a romance – self enhancement or self-sharing? Submission or dominance? A place in this world or a world apart? Drawing together classics like Wuthering Heights and Middlemarch, epics from Ayn Rand and Dorothy Dunnett, and pop culture romances from The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Sheik to the Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey sagas, Judith Wilt depicts the feminine imagination conceiving the hero as 'the girl' in pursuit of a transcendent self, as the mother looking for a partner in community… and in fifty shades between these figures. The Catherines of Wuthering Heights are allegories of Leaving and Loving; Middlemarch both an allegory of will and a romance between the heroine and (her) Will Ladislaw; the dangerous lovers of twentieth and twenty-first century romance go to masochistic extremes. And the reader finds pleasures both radical and conservative in the controversial domain of 'romance.'

Includes the chapter: Wuthering Heights: A Romance of Metaphysical Intent.

Postscripts. Caribbean Perspectives on the British Canon from Shakespeare to Dickens
Giselle Rampaul & Barbara Lalla (eds.)
University of the West Indies Press
ISBN: 978-976-640-462-8
Published: 2014

By adopting a Caribbean perspective through which to re-examine seventeenth- to nineteenth-century texts from the British canon, this collection of essays uncovers the ways in which the literature produced at the height of British imperialism was used to consolidate and validate the national identity of the colonizer, and to justify political and cultural domination of Other places like the Caribbean.
The contributors critique a wide range of verse and prose from the works of Shakespeare, Donne, Defoe, Austen, Brontë, Froude, Kingsley, Trollope, Jenkins, Stevenson, Barrie, Carroll and Dickens, revealing a literature that was very much a product of its time, but that was also responsible for contemporary and later conceptions of the Caribbean and other outposts of empire. While the critics in this volume demonstrate how such texts constructed and perpetuated the “fact” of superior British culture and civilization, they also apply to their literary interpretation a Caribbean experience of challenges associated with nation-building and identity formation. The contributors examine English literary excursions into nationhood, self-definition, freedom and confinement, and engagements with the Other – the very issues through which the Caribbean has grown into being.
In revealing the complex but familiar insecurities and challenges through which English literature evolved to canonicity, Postscripts follows Barbara Lalla’s Postcolonialisms, which offered Caribbean rereadings of English medieval verse. Like that earlier study, Postscripts addresses both scholars of English literature and literary history, and those of Caribbean and postcolonial studies, and speaks to a wide readership that spans cultures sharing a colonized or colonizing past.