Adèle, Bibliography and Hawthorne

Recent Brontë-related papers not previously featured on this blog:

Source material: A Brontë Reading List: Part 10 — Charlotte Brontë, James Ogden, Sara L. Pearson & Peter Cook, Brontë Studies, Volume 44, 2019 - Issue 3, 306-322

Accepting Adèle in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
Alexandra Valint
Dickens Studies Annual, 47 (2016), 201-11

Adèle, Jane Eyre’s pupil in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, is often caricaturized by critics as a shallow flirt and mini-Blanche, even though, throughout the novel, Adèle is spirited, affectionate, and obliging. Although critics often suggest that Jane is disappointed in or apathetic towards Adèle, I argue that Jane sincerely cares for her student. While critics liken Adèle to Céline and Blanche, Adèle actually resembles Jane—both are orphaned, speak French and English, are described as “foreigners,” espouse skepticism, and exercise their artistic talents. In line with scholarship that shows female friendship’s centrality in Victorian literature, I draw attention to the warm friendship between Adèle and Jane and show how their friendship paves the way for Jane and Rochester’s friendship-turned-romance. Adèle, while like Jane, never serves as a simple double for her or as a mere mechanism for the novel’s central romance. Both Jane and Rochester, at times, problematically project their own selves and pasts onto Adèle, which the novel critiques by revealing the self-centered motives behind such attempts and by highlighting the gap between the faulty projections and the real Adèle. More broadly, my focus on Adèle, one of the novel’s main child characters, points to the novel’s acceptance of children’s worldliness and its critique of the Romantic child.

Charlotte Brontë: A Bicentenary Bibliography
Sara L. Pearson
Dickens Studies Annual, 47 (2016), 353-87

This essay seeks to achieve two goals: to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth with a survey of scholarship on her life and works, and to bring together Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens through a summary of critical work that engages with both authors in tandem. The essay begins by examining these scholarly perspectives on Brontë and Dickens before turning to a résumé of classic and cutting-edge work on Charlotte Brontë, organized according to categories that have also been the focus of recent Dickens review essays in Dickens Studies Annual. Of necessity, this summary has been highly selective, including the most important ground-breaking works from the past as well as the highlights of recent studies from 2011 to 2015. The categories are as follows: Biographies and Biographical Criticism; Primary Sources and Reference Works; Influences and Intertextualities; Space and Place; Psychology; Gender; Capitalism, Industry, the Material World; Religion; Style and Narrative; Adaptation, Afterlives, and Performance; Transatlanticism; Bodies, Illness, and Disability Studies; Victorian Print Culture; and Global Brontë.

And a chapter of the book:

Nathaniel Hawthorne in the College Classroom:
Contexts, Materials, and Approaches
Christopher Diller and Samuel Coale (Eds.)
Edward Everett Root
ISBN 9781912224197

which is: Hawthorne and the Brontës: A Transatlantic Senior Capstone Course by Donald Ross