Iran, Korea, Kurdistan and the Caribbean

New Brontë-related scholar works:

The chapter of an upcoming book:

Tahmasebian, Kayvan and Gould, Rebecca Ruth
The Translatability of Love: The Romance Genre and the Prismatic Reception of Jane Eyre in Twentieth-Century Iran (September 27, 2019).
Close Reading a Global Novel: Prismatic Jane Eyre, Forthcoming.
Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3460531 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3460531

This chapter examines how twentieth century Iranian readers situated Jane Eyre within the classical genre of romance literature (adabiyāt-i ʿāshiqāna), originating from the tradition of love narratives in verse (ʿishq-nāma) pioneered by the twelfth century Persian poet Nizami Ganjevi. While romance is only one among several of the original Jane Eyre’s modes of generic belonging, translation and reception of Jane Eyre into Persian facilitated the novel’s generic re-calibration. We show how the prohibition on romance literature following the 1979 Iranian revolution made way for foreign classics such as Jane Eyre to be read as romances in the classical sense of the term. Drawing on morphological and narratological studies on the structure of the Persian romance, we read Jane Eyre through the lens of Nizami’s romances in our reconstruction of the Iranian reader’s horizon of expectation. This research establishes how prismatic Persian translations contributed to the novel’s generic transformation of world literary history.

A paper published in Korea,

The Negotiation of Multiple Audiences of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
Kang, Meeyoung(Sookmyung Women’s University)
신영어영문학회신영어영문학신영어영문학 제73집2019.08241 - 260

This study analyzes the way a novelist interacts with multiple audiences and finally produces a literary text by showing that Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is an outcome of the complex and dynamic interaction of readers, writers, and texts. Standing against the linear interpretation that Jane Eyre is a feminist text, showing spiritual growth of a female character, Jane Eyre, or reflection of British imperialism and white-centered feminism, I argue that both the positive and negative interpretations of Jane Eyre derive from Bronte’s negotiation of the corporate politics of multiple readers. To show this process in an efficient way, I analyze Jane Eyre in terms of its relationship with the different types of audiences: the imagined readers Brontë fictionalizes in her mind,
readers in the text addressed as “readers”, and external readers who actually read the novel.

Another one in... of all places, Kurdistan:

The Representation of Marital Abuse in the Brontës’ Literary Writings: A Feminist Approach 
Bekhal Bayz Kareem
Knowledge University Erbil/ Kurdistan Region

This research paper examines the way that the Brontë sisters write about one of the most important issues in a person’s life, the decision of marriage and how it can lead to a woman being abused by her chosen partner.  This paper aims at proving how the Brontë sister’s trilogy:  Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall have been used by the authors themselves to criticize the Victorian repressive marriage which is lacking love.  The subject matter within the paper claims that each one of the chosen texts shows how the sibling authors have similar opinions or tendencies regarding the above-mentioned issue and how they disapprove of the traditional marriage, by which women become oppressed.  The selected texts are regarded as early feminist writings by critics and scholars for their depiction of marital abuse.  By conducting research combining social backgrounds and close reading, the paper sets out to focus on the character’s mistakes regarding marriage like Bertha in Jane Eyre, Isabella in Wuthering Heights, and Helen in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.   The study points out that the chosen females in the writings are depicted to be passive characters.   To establish this identity, the study illustrates that how their mythical principles on which their marriage based leads to them being victims of marital abuse. 

A thesis:

Entre Les Hauts de Hurle-Vent et La Migration des Cœurs : La Féminité Créolisée chez Maryse Condé
Eleanor Frances Matson
Whitman College, 2019

Dans un entretien sur La Migration des Cœurs, Maryse Condé a caractérisé son choix de transposer un texte de Emily Brontë de la façon suivante, car elle avait envie d’illuminer la connexion entre Brontë et les femmes antillaises : « Car, en fait, il y a quelque chose des sœurs Brontë qui parle à des femmes caribéennes, de n’importe quelle couleur, de n’importe quel âgé… » (Wolff, 76).1
 Son accent sur les femmes caribéennes soulève des questions sur le rôle du genre et les raisons pour lesquelles Les Hauts de Hurle-Vent pourrait parler aux femmes caribéennes. Cependant, on peut demander aussi comment Condé transpose la féminité qu’on voit dans l’hypotexte de Brontë à celui de La Migration des Cœurs et quels sont les effets de cette transposition sur le texte.