Brontë Studies. Volume 44, Issue 4

The new issue of Brontë Studies (Volume 44 Issue 4, October 2019) is already available online. We provide you with the table of contents and abstracts:

Editorial
pp. 337-338  Author: Amber M. Adams

Physiognomy in The Professor
pp.  339-350  Author: Tytler, Graeme
Abstract: 
One of the most striking things about nineteenth-century English fiction is the extent to which it betrays the influence of the extraordinary cult of physiognomy that had been pervading Europe and elsewhere ever since Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente (Essays on Physiognomy) first appeared in the late eighteenth century. This influence is especially conspicuous in Charlotte Brontë’s posthumously published novel, The Professor. We note, for example, that as well as referring to various physiognomic terms and making use of some of Lavater’s best-known theories, the author presents a number of her characters as physiognomists, the most prominent among them being her first-person narrator, William Crimsworth. Noteworthy, too, are the ways in which physiognomy is resorted to in the portrayal of perhaps the most interesting character of the novel, Yorke Hunsden. Also worth mentioning is that, as in Charlotte’s other fictional works, physiognomy here plays an important part in the treatment of love.

‘Music to my Ears’: Lucy Snowe’s French Connection in Villette
pp. 351-363 Author: Ross, Michael L.
Abstract: 
Drawing on theories of Bakhtin and John Edwards, this essay argues that the profusion of French in Charlotte Brontë’s novels derives not from authorial caprice but from careful artistic design. Especially in Villette, the judicious placement of such ‘foreign’ elements underscores Lucy Snowe’s emergence from Anglophone passivity to Francophone agency. Above all, in the counterpointing of the two male leads, Dr Graham Bretton and M. Paul Emanuel, this shift in linguistic gestalt becomes manifest. It is clinched in the culminating confrontation between Mme Beck and M. Paul, where the distribution of the two languages is dramatically telling.

Empty Nests and Murdered Babies: Thoughts on the Theme of Infanticide in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
pp.  364-375   Author: Southgate, Beverley
Abstract: 
In 1842 Emily Brontё wrote a series of French essays. In the piece called ‘Le Papillon’, a nightingale is singing. The speaker warns the mother-bird to stop, fearing a particular kind of danger: ‘Poor fool […] is it to guide the shot to your flesh or the child to your little ones that you sing so high and so clear? Silence this inappropriate melody, huddle down on your nest; tomorrow, perhaps, it will be empty’. When Emily Brontё wrote Wuthering Heights four years later, the idea of empty nests or murdered babies continued to haunt her imagination. Her novel reveals wreckage and devastation. The sense is of harm done. In this article, by using the insights offered by Kleinian psychoanalysis, I explore the theme of infanticide — or the phantasy of baby-murder — such a point of fixation for the novel, and its author, but less so for readers and critics; largely because sadism and envy are uncomfortable elements to consider.

Kristevan Herethics in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
pp. 376-391  Author: Wu, Min-Hua
Abstract: 
The paper explores how writing becomes a necessary means for Julia Kristeva and Emily Brontë to deal with the Law of the Father by resorting to the subjective alterity looming in the Imaginary. It argues that both Kristeva and Emily Brontë deal with the Symbolic by means of ruptures from within the structure of language; it is with the Symbolic as their medium that the British novelist and the French theorist manage to fathom the semiotic, the maternal and the jouissance in creative writing and discursive theorization. Both Emily Brontë and Kristeva attempt to obliterate essentialist, universalist and even differentialist traces of any permanent and constant peculiar identity as a woman. Both are able to compel in readers a strong consciousness of ‘otherness’, an otherness deeply rooted in the herethics of love, a new ethics based on a newly conceived relation between mother and child, the self and the other, the citizen and the foreigner, and the orthodox and the heretic.

A Brontë Reading List: Part 11 — Anne and Emily Brontë
pp. 392-401 Author: Ogden, James; Pearson, Sara L. & Cook, Peter 
Abstract:
The 2016 bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth was marked by an unusually large number of publications on her life and work, including special journal issues of Victorian Review (42.2) and Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature (130). In order to accommodate all of this work, we decided to review the year in two parts: the first part (published in July 2019) covered Charlotte Brontë, and this second part covers Anne and Emily Brontë.
This list is part of an annotated bibliography of scholarly and critical work. The earlier parts were published in Brontë Studies, 32.2 (July 2007), 33.3 (November 2008), 34.3 (November 2009), 36.4 (November 2011), 37.3 (September 2012), 39.1 (January 2014), 41.3 (September 2016), 42.4 (November 2017), 43.4 (October 2018) and 44.3 (July 2019). The present part covers work published in 2016.


REVIEWS

Aunt Branwell and the Brontë Legacy
pp. 402-404 Author:  Stoneman, Patsy

Charlotte Brontë: My Life in Verse
pp. 404-405 Author:  Duckett, Bob

Charlotte Brontë. The Lost Manuscripts
pp .405-406 Author:  Duckett, Bob

The Romantic Legacy of Charles Dickens
pp. 406-408 Author:  Pearson, Sarah L. 

Charlotte Brontë. Legacies and Afterlives

pp. 408-410 Author: Duckett, Bob

Literary Trails: Haworth and the Brontës
pp. 410  Author:  Duckett, Bob

The Brontës Treasury: The Life, Times and Works of Charlotte, Emily and Anne
pp. 411  Author:  Duckett, Bob