Brontë Studies. Volume 46. Issue 1

The new issue of Brontë Studies (Volume 46 Issue 1, January 2021) is already available online. We provide you with the table of contents and abstracts:

Editorial
pp. 1-3 Author:  Amber M. Adams

Emily Brontë in the Post-Romantic Age: The Transformation of Romantic Imagination in Emily Brontë’s Poems
pp.  4-17  Author: Zhao, Jinging
Abstract: 
Though the Romantic lineage of Emily Brontë’s works has been identified by critics, the post-Romantic feature of her writings remains to be further explored. By focusing on the representation of a cardinal concept in Romanticism — the Romantic imagination – in Emily Brontë’s poems, this article seeks to explore the transformation of Romanticism in Emily’s world. It aims to present a detailed analysis of Emily Brontë’s relationship with the Romantic movement, her mixed feelings towards the Romantic legacy of the preceding generation, as well as the spiritual dilemma she faces.

Comedy in Wuthering Heights
pp. 18-29 Author: Tytler, Graeme
Abstract: 
A careful reading of Wuthering Heights shows that, notwithstanding the grimness permeating its various narratives, there are elements in the text which may be said to be of essentially comic interest. That Emily Brontë seems to have no mean gift for comedy is apparent enough, say, through Joseph’s witty utterances; through the satirical portrait of the housekeeper Zillah; through the silly things said by some of the main characters as youngsters; and through a number of more or less farcical incidents and episodes, to cite a few obvious examples. Much less obvious, on the other hand, are some of the ways in which Emily gives us to understand that her two principal narrators, Lockwood and Nelly Dean, should be viewed as somewhat comic figures, thereby confirming for us the idea that, for all its distressing content, her novel nevertheless represents a happy blending of comedy with tragedy.

The Queer Ecological Aesthetics of Wuthering Heights
pp.  30-42   Author: Patnaik, Anhiti
Abstract: 
This essay explores how the contemporary English filmmaker Andrea Arnold invents a queer ecological aesthetic to adapt Emily Brontë’s classic novel Wuthering Heights in her 2011 film by the same title. A queer ecological aesthetic combines queer, ecofeminist and postcolonial approaches to disavow the institutional and cultural ways in which white heterosexist patriarchy ‘sexualizes’ nature and ‘naturalizes’ heterosexuality. Arnold’s film forges subtle intimacies between nature and sexuality and the human and the non-human by focusing on Catherine and Heathcliff’s ambiguous erotic encounters on the moor. In lieu of a formal plot, dialogue and musical score, Arnold locates Catherine’s and Heathcliff’s desires within a complex mesh of ecological and creaturely narratives. Her film critiques ecophobic and erotophobic discourses in the West by depicting tactile and affective gestures between Catherine and Heathcliff that may be deemed ‘queer ecological’. This is also evident in Heathcliff’s intersectional character as a feral/non-white/non-human child whose presence threatens the white heterosexist patriarchal structures of the Yorkshire gentry. The essay reveals how Arnold revives the subversive impact of the original novel in the Victorian age for a contemporary ecophobic and erotophobic audience.

‘Currer Bell’: Jane Eyre’s Alternative Proper Name
pp. 43-55  Author: Jung, Daun
Abstract: 
This essay reads ‘Currer Bell’ as an important alternative name for Jane Eyre which helped to convey an ambiguous sense of authorship and genre to the public at its initial publication. Through a close analysis of its discursive and narrative function, this essay will demonstrate how ‘Currer Bell’ worked as a curious name that helped to construct ambiguous subjectivities for both Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre. While this strange proper name worked as part of Jane Eyre’s realist project at first, it became a disrupting element to the book’s genre claim later. At the same time, Jane Eyre’s first-person narrative authority had been challenged by the outer voice of ‘Currer Bell’.authorial credibility and moral character.

In the Name of the Mother: Matrilineal Bonds in Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor
pp. 56-68 Author:  García-Cuevas García, Raquel
Abstract:
A study of motherhood in Charlotte Brontë’s novels cannot be considered complete without addressing the importance of matrilineal bonds in her first novel, The Professor. Although the figure of the mother is present throughout the novel, this aspect has barely received any critical attention. Both main characters, William Crimsworth and Frances Henri, are shown actively to seek re-encounters with the maternal figure, which does not feature as explicitly in any of the other novels by Charlotte Brontë. Thus, by exploring the importance of matrilineal bonds in The Professor, this article seeks to illuminate how Charlotte Brontë was negotiating with questions of motherhood from the beginning of her career as a novelist.

‘Work abounded, wages rose’: Political Economy in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy
pp.  69-81 Author: Setecka, Agnieszka 
Abstract:
This article discusses Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley as a response to ‘The Hill and the Valley’, one of Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy. Whereas ‘The Hill and the Valley’ is informed by a belief that following the rules of political economy can solve all social problems of the day, Shirley, for all its similarities to Martineau’s novella, reflects different, less unambiguously affirmative attitudes to capitalism and political economy. Even the novel’s happy ending, which brings prosperity and settles social conflicts in Yorkshire, has too much of a fairy tale quality to convince the reader of the beneficial influence of the free market economy.

Jane Eyre’s Rooks and Crows
pp.  82-87 Author: O'Gorman, Francis
Abstract:
This short paper looks again at an intriguing pattern in Charlotte Brontë’s imagining of corvids in Jane Eyre (1847), suggesting that these creatures are indications of a particular, and very probably unconscious, imaginative habit in the novel. The birds appear in the text at crucial moments as if they are closely associated in Charlotte’s mind with important turns in the plot. The end of the paper considers the subtle implications of these creatures of the air for the novel’s wider interest in the air itself.

 REVIEWS

Charlotte Brontë, Embodiment and the Material World
pp. 88-90  Author: Pearson, Sara L.

The Brontës and War: Fantasy and Conflict in Charlotte and Branwell Brontë’s Youthful Writing
pp. 90-92 Author:  Duckett, Bob

History of English Literature, Volume 5: Early and Mid-Victorian Fiction, 1832–1870
pp. 92-93 Author:  Watson, Graham

Glass Town [A Graphic Novel]
pp. 93-95 Author:  Duckett, Bob

Rereading Jane Eyre: A Personal Retrospective
pp. 95-96 Author:  Van Der Meer, Carolyne