Blindness, gender, and autobiography

More scholar books with Brontë-related content:

Blindness and WritingFrom Wordsworth to Gissingby Heather Tilley
Cambridge University Press
Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
ISBN: 9781107194212
November 2017

In this innovative and important study, Heather Tilley examines the huge shifts that took place in the experience and conceptualisation of blindness during the nineteenth century, and demonstrates how new writing technologies for blind people had transformative effects on literary culture. Considering the ways in which visually-impaired people used textual means to shape their own identities, the book argues that blindness was also a significant trope through which writers reflected on the act of crafting literary form. Supported by an illuminating range of archival material (including unpublished letters from Wordsworth's circle, early ophthalmologic texts, embossed books, and autobiographies) this is a rich account of blind people's experience, and reveals the close, and often surprising personal engagement that canonical writers had with visual impairment. Drawing on the insights of disability studies and cultural phenomenology, Tilley highlights the importance of attending to embodied experience in the production and consumption of texts.

Chapter 5 is 'Blindness, gender, and autobiography: reading and writing the self in Jane Eyre, Aurora Leigh, and The Life of Charlotte Brontë'.