Brontë Studies. Volume 42, Issue 2

The new issue of Brontë Studies (Volume 42, Issue 2, March 2017) is already available online. We provide you with the table of contents and abstracts:       

Editorial
pp. 89-90 Author: Amber A. Adams

Further Thoughts on Aspects of Emily Brontë’s poems
pp. 91-99 Author:  Chitham, Edward
Abstract:
There is much work to be done on our understanding of the role played in the lives of Emily and Anne Brontë by their fictional land of Gondal. Here I propose to deal with three issues: (a) What more can we say about ‘Gondal’s Queen’? (b) When did Gondal end? (c) Is there anything further to say about the poem ‘Often Rebuked’? These are contributions to discussion, certainly not final. Both Emily and Anne separated their work in their manuscripts into Gondal and non-Gondal poems. Emily’s copy manuscripts are usually known as A (non-Gondal) and B (Gondal).

Time-Space Compression in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
pp. 100-108 Author:  Poklad, Josh
Abstract:
This essay provides a reading of the geographical structure of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Using concepts borrowed from the theory of Mikhail Bakhtin and David Harvey, it shows that the geography of Wuthering Heights comprises a juxtaposition of two temporally and spatially contrasting environments. The interaction between these two geographies is interpreted as Emily Brontë’s exploration of the conflict between capitalist and feudal socio-economic systems, and, more broadly, between social and cultural modernity and Britain’s pre-modern past.

‘He’s more myself than I am’: The Problem of Comparisons in Wuthering Heights
pp. 109-117  Author:  Tytler, Graeme
Abstract:
A careful reading of Wuthering Heights makes us aware of the abundance of comparisons to be found therein and of the various thematic functions they serve. As well as several comparisons in the form of similes, a significant number of which have to do with likenesses between human beings and animals, we come across comparisons that the characters now and again make between two individuals or between themselves and other people. But except where they have to do with similarities or differences as to, say, age or physicality or situation, comparisons between persons often seem unduly subjective and, in many cases, even fallacious. The fact that Emily Brontë thereby suggests that such comparisons are inherently problematic is hardly to be wondered at if we recognize the extent to which she is fundamentally concerned here with the primacy of each human identity, especially through her treatment of love.

Female Images in Jane Eyre and The Woman in White in Russian Translations of the 1840–60s
pp. 118-129 Author:  Irina A. Matveenko, Anna A. Syskina, Irina A. Aizikova, Vitaly S. Kiselev & Sue Lonoff
Abstract:
This article analyses mid-nineteenth-century Russian translations of Jane Eyre and The Woman in White, with a special focus on the way these novels rendered images of women. Particular attention is paid to the contemporary Russian context, the reasons for the translators’ diverse approaches, and the consequent choices they made as they translated the original texts. We conclude that Russian interest in these English novels was spurred by the search for a contemporary literary heroine. The translated versions partially filled this lacuna, thereby effecting a satisfying compromise between the British and Russian literary traditions.

Charlotte Brontë’s Alternative Enlightenment: The Muslim Other in Villette
pp. 130-142 Author:  Aljenfawi, Khaled
Abstract:
Anne Brontë may be less famous than her sisters, but contemporary popular culture still makes many knowing allusions to the writer. This article delineates the origins and development of some of the key motifs in representations of Anne Brontë’s life, death and literary imagination. Investigating the reasons for this writer's continuous marginalization, this examination also explores the ways in which the critical discourse parallels the writer’s re-emergence in popular culture as a feminist figure.

Portals of Desire in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall
pp. 143-153 Author: Nyman, Micki
Abstract:
Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre (1847) and Fanny Fern in Ruth Hall (1855) inscribe the possibility for personal agency through textual passages that describe border spaces and movement between margin and periphery, inside and outside, and departure and arrival. The authors employ architectural portals — windows, doorways, gates, stairs and hallways — to illuminate an array of physical, psychic and socio-cultural spaces and to convey a more fluid sense of truth as knowledge gained by experience. Truth is represented within a subjective lens, in the different positions their protagonists assume. By way of the insertion of autobiographic resonances in their fiction, Charlotte Brontë and Fanny Fern invert public and private spheres, thereby creating a strategy for personal agency. This emphasis on mobile independence for a woman did not sit well with many nineteenth-century critics, who responded adversely to the implied expansion of gender roles. Ultimately, Charlotte Brontë and Fern, through their method of encoding threshold images with subjective significance, create a conceptual space that affords possibilities of resistance to social oppression.

Reviews
Simple Dame Fairfax
pp. 154 Author:  Duckett, Bob

Place and Progress in the Works of Elizabeth Gaskell
pp. 155-156 Author:  Pearson, Sarah L.

The Brontës in the English Lake District
pp. 157-158 Author: Mullis, Aileen

Critical Insights: Jane Eyre
p. 158-161 Author: Duckett, Bob

Charlotte Brontë Revisited: A View from the Twenty-First Century
p. 161-163 Author: O'Callaghan, Claire

‘A Brontё Reading List, Parts 1–7 (2007–2016)
p. 163-167 Author: Duckett, Bob

Correspondence

 ‘Emily Brontë. From a painting by Charlotte Brontë, hitherto unpublished’p. 168-169 Author: Duckett, Bob
A Response to ‘Emily Brontë. From a painting by Charlotte Brontë, hitherto unpublished’ p. 169  Author: Christopher Heywood