The Collar and Byronism

A couple of new scholar works with Brontë-related content:

The Collar
Reading Christian Ministry in Fiction, Television, and Film
By Sue Sorensen
James Clarke & Co Ltd
ISBN: 9780718893644
Publication: December 2014

Combining thematic analysis and stimulating close readings, The Collar is a wideranging study of the many ways – heroic or comic, shrewd or dastardly – in which Christian clergy have been represented in literature, from George Herbert and Laurence Sterne via An
thony Trollope, G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot and Graham Greene to Susan Howatch and Robertson Davies, and in film and television, such as Pale Rider, The Thorn Birds, The Vicar of Dibley and Father Ted. Since all Christians are expected to be involved in ministry of some type, the assumptions of secular culture about ministers affect more than just clergy. Ranging across several nations (particularly Britain, the U.S., and Canada), denominations, and centuries, The Collar encourages creative and faithful responses to the challenges of Christian leadership and develops awareness of the times when leadership expectations become too extreme. Using the framework of different media to make inquiries about pastoral passion, frustration, and fallibility, Sue Sorensen's well-informed, sprightly and perceptive book will be helpful to anyone who enjoys evocative literature and film as well as to clergy and those interested in practical theology.

Includes:

6. Failure, for Worse and for Better
Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, Margaret Oliphant, Jane Austen, John Updike, Clint Eastwood
Interlude: Doubt, a Parable by John Patrick Shanley

The Female Romantics
Nineteenth-century Women Novelists and Byronism
By Caroline Franklin
Routledge
Paperback: 978-1-13-885074-3
November 10th 2014
Hardback: 978-0-415-99541-2
August 10th 2012

Awarded the Elma Dangerfield Prize by the International Byron Society in 2013

The nineteenth century is sometimes seen as a lacuna between two literary periods. In terms of women’s writing, however, the era between the death of Mary Wollstonecraft and the 1860s feminist movement produced a coherent body of major works, impelled by an ongoing dialogue between Enlightenment ‘feminism’ and late Romanticism. This study focuses on the dynamic interaction between Lord Byron and Madame de Staël, Lady Morgan, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen, challenging previous critics’ segregation of the male Romantic writers from their female peers.
The Romantic movement in general unleashed the creative ambitions of nineteenth-century female novelists, and the public voice of Byron in particular engaged them in transnational issues of political, national and sexual freedom. Byronism had itself been shaped by the poet’s incursion onto a literary scene where women readers were dominant and formidable intellectuals such as Madame de Staël were lionized. Byron engaged in rivalrous dialogue with the novels of his female friends and contemporaries, such as Caroline Lamb, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen, whose critiques of Romantic egotism helped prompt his own self-parody in Don Juan. Later Victorian novelists, such as George Sand, the Brontë sisters and Harriet Beecher Stowe, wove their rejection of their childhood attraction to Byronism, and their dawning awareness of the significance for women of Lady Byron’s actions, into the feminist fabric of their art.

Includes:

5. "My voice shall with thy future visions blend": Byron’s daughters, Lady Byron and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 
6. "Happiness is not a potato": Byron, Belgium and the romantic feminism of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette.