Napoleon III, Place Model

New Brontë-related scholar works:

The Silence, Exile, and Cunning of “I”: An Analysis of Bildungsroman as the Place Model in the Work of Charlotte Brontë and James Joyce
by Kathryn White and Frank Ferguson
Educ. Sci. 2019, 9(4), 248

Education, be that on a moral, social or intellectual level, in a formal setting or via lived experience is Bildungsroman’s raison d’être. ‘Moments of crisis’ and the resultant demonstration of the journey towards awareness of personal autonomy, agency, identity and place are discussed via geographical imagination. This article examines ‘fictional’ teachers, the impact of the ‘professional’ on formative development and how the fictional characters of Jane Eyre and Stephen Dedalus fit within and extend the Place Model.

“He Resembled the Great Emperor”
Charlotte Brontë, Villette, and the Rise of Napoleon III
Matthew Heitzman
Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 74 No. 2, September 2019; (pp. 199-223)

This essay offers a local historical context for Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), reading it in relation to the rise of Napoleon III as Emperor of France. Napoleon III completed his ascendancy just as Brontë was completing her novel. His rise prompted a mixture of anxiety and optimism in the English press, as English political commentators were uncertain if this new Napoleon’s reign would mark a return to the Anglo-French nationalist strife of the first Napoleonic period or if his rule would mark a détente and productive path forward for Anglo-French relations. I argue that this ambiguity is coded into Brontë’s characterization of Monsieur Paul Emanuel, and that we can read Monsieur Paul’s romance with Lucy Snowe as a political allegory—Brontë’s attempt to decipher what Napoleon III’s rapid rise meant for Anglo-French relations. I suggest in this essay that Brontë’s interest in the contemporary Anglo-French political context was a product of her fascination with Napoleon Bonaparte, specifically his rivalry with the Duke of Wellington, and that understanding her interest in the first Napoleonic period can help us to decipher why her depiction of Anglo-French nationalist interaction in Villette is totally at odds with her other novels, where French nationalism is typically a trait that needs to be effaced.
Exploring Madness and Ableism in the Context of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea
Sara Dorsten
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism, Volume 12, Issue 1 Winter 2019

Ableism and racism have an intertwined relationship in that both are used as oppressive forces. Colonizers use form of oppression to Other people they want to exploit, and in relevance to
this essay, they apply some form of disability to the oppressed people to rationalize why they are inferior. This carries forward in a troublesome way because characters of color in Postcolonial writing often accuse each other of madness, thereby utilizing a form of oppression against an already oppressed character. Wide Sargasso Sea provides a rife ground for contextualizing how
colonizers use accusations of madness to exercise control, and this text can be
used to extend how Postcolonial writers and scholars continue to use ableist
language as they discuss the oppression of people of color.

Reviews:

Deborah Denenholz Morse (2019) On the Bullet Train with Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights in Japan, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2019.1658401

Jones, Anna Maria. Victorian Studies, vol. 61, no. 3, 2019, pp. 500–502. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/victorianstudies.61.3.20. Reviewed Work: On the Bullet Train with Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights in Japan by Judith Pascoe

McConville, Adam. Review of Charlotte Brontë before Jane Eyre, by Glynnis Fawkes. Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, vol. 73 no. 2, 2019, p. 65-65. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/bcc.2019.0651