In this study, the investigative focus is given by the typological analysis of the female reader postulated by three Victorian novelists – Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë and George Eliot – in Jane Eyre (1847), Wuthering Heights (1847), Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Middlemarch (1871-1872). The act of reading performed by fictional women in the English novel of the Victorian period undoubtedly requires clarifications and delimitations. The internal chronology of the texts places the biography of the female reader in the five emblematic mother texts for the Victorian period in a broader historical, cultural, educational and social process that involves, in 19th century England, the proliferation of books of all kinds, the diversification of the reading public, the relativization of the taste for reading, but also the polyvalence of the types of pleasure and instruction offered by it. The central intention of the book is, therefore, to formulate a comprehensive description of the notion of "reading", revolutionized in the Victorian era, when the author-book-reader relationship became impossible to account for, and the female audience became increasingly refined.
The book is addressed not only to English scholars, but – thanks to the exegetical methodology used – also to the general, non-specialized public. What new breath can be added to iconic figures of 19th-century English literature and to the female characters created by the pens of the novelists of the time, already turned on all sides? The answer represents an opportune occasion for this work to bring into discussion, through a reader-oriented analysis, the function of reading (active, productive, ultimately propelling the recipient's desire to write and rewrite any complex phenomenon that wins the approval of the text label) – on the scene of identity changes – in the life of the woman-reader/intellectual/educated and, by extension, in the psycho-cultural destiny of the woman who reads, a woman attested historically and culturally. In the Western world, the methodological interest in the act of reading (performed by fictional and historically attested women alike) has reached, in recent decades, countless nuances and refinements. Since the interest in the female reader as represented in the Victorian novel is quite weak in the native space, the indirect aim of the work to contribute to the enrichment of the poetics of reading cannot be ignored either. The choice of the five reading examples discussed at length in the work is not at all arbitrary. In the complex game of reading within the five novels, we can discover the expansion of the English textual consciousness (in the sense of cultural anthropologists): each text refers ad infinitum to other texts, forcing the external reader to (re)read both the mother text and the embedded texts belonging to the predecessors. The ultimate goal of the woman-reader's reading is, as each bundle of hypotheses advanced in the last three sections of the book will indicate, self-reading – the scrutiny of the self through new forms of self-knowledge and legibility.
0 comments:
Post a Comment