Tag: Charlotte Brontë

Patrick Brontë: A Forgotten Figure in the Brontë Mythos

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Patrick Brontë, father of the celebrated Brontë siblings, has long been overshadowed by the gothic genius of Emily, the moral rigour of Charlotte, and the protofeminist defiance of Anne. Often reduced to the archetype of the stern Victorian patriarch, Patrick has not enjoyed the same critical attention as his daughters. Yet his own literary contributions deserve reconsideration, not as peripheral curiosities, but as integral to the intellectual and moral foundation of the Brontë family. His works reveal a mind deeply

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Victorian Paper Art and Craft: Writers and Their Materials

Book Reviews

Lutz, Deborah. Victorian Paper Art and Craft: Writers and Their Materials. Oxford University Press, 20 January 2023, 240 pp., $45.00 (hardcover), ISBN: 9780198858799 In 1845, desperate after months of silence from Constantin Heger, the French professor she loved, Charlotte Brontë wrote to him in a frantic state. She begged for the crumbs of his friendship in the strongest of terms, ascribing a life-giving quality to his written word. Her final letter ends with a plea: “when the sweet delight of

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Martin Willis, ‘Are we sure we want evolutionary psychologists telling us what Victorian novels mean?’

Published in JVC

Martin Willis is Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University, Chair of the British Society for Literature and Science, Editor of the Journal of Literature and Science and head of the Cardiff University ScienceHumanities research team.  I noted with interest, and some dismay that the Journal of Victorian Culture was drawing attention, via Twitter, to the Guardian’s old article on evolutionary psychology and the Victorian novel that described, without criticism, the work of Joseph Carroll and his fellow literary Darwinists.[1] Heartened

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Hila Shachar, ‘Walking New Myths: Sally Wainwright’s Brontë Biopic’

Published in JVC

Hila Shachar is a Lecturer in English Literature at De Montfort University, Leicester, and a member of the Centre for Adaptations who specialises in the adaptation of literary works and authors in various media including film, television, and ballet. Her book, Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), was featured in The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, as well as nominated for the 2012 Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. She also works as

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Jessica Cox, The Madwoman in the Third Storey

Published in JVC

Jessica Cox read Wuthering Heights at the age of sixteen, resulting in a developing obsession with all things Victorian.  This eventually led to her completing a PhD (on sensation writer Wilkie Collins) at Swansea University in 2007.  She is currently a lecturer in English at Brunel University, London.  Jessica has research interests in Victorian popular fiction (particularly sensation fiction), the Brontёs, first-wave feminism, and neo-Victorianism.  She is the author of a short biography of Charlotte Brontё, editor of a collection

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‘Rethinking the Nineteenth Century’ Conference Report

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By Kirsten Harris, University of Nottingham The University of Sheffield’s one day conference ‘Rethinking the Nineteenth Century’, held on 24th August, centred on the timely question ‘what constitutes nineteenth century studies today?’.  This stimulated a thought-provoking and broad set of responses, with some papers offering rethinkings of specific texts, ideas or historical assumptions while others focused on considerations of the changing field itself. The day began with Mark Llewellyn’s interrogation of contemporary engagement with Victorian culture in his keynote paper,

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Digital Continuations of Victorian Classics

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By Carrie Sickmann Han, Indiana University Charles Dickens’s novels might actually go on forever, not only as immortal works of literature, but as infinitely continuable fictions, thanks in part to tweets like the one above. It’s a familiar fact that the digital humanities supply us with new methodological tools and reading platforms, but these technologies also produce a seemingly inexhaustible, living archive of neo-Victorian fictions that reposition us as co-authors of beloved Victorian novels. Twitter isn’t only “like” a Dickens

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Brontë by Polly Teale

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By Charlotte Mathieson, University of Warwick In May 2013, the Capitol Theatre in Manchester staged a production of the play Brontë, by Polly Teale. Originally staged by Shared Experience in 2005 (of which you can view a short trailer online), the play explores the life and writing of the Brontës through key episodes from their lives and scenes from their writing. I went to watch the production with fellow Victorianist and life-writing specialist Amber Regis, and in this filmed conversation

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Katherine Inglis, ‘Ophthalmoscopy in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette’

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In JVC 15.3, Katherine Inglis re-examines the representation of scopic conflict and discipline in Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Villette (1853), within the context of the reconfiguration of the eye during the 1850s. Villette is pioneering in its representation of an ophthalmoscopic conception of the eye, as an organ which could be looked into by medical practitioners as well as looked at. This notion of the eye was only possible after Hermann von Helmholtz’s invention of the ophthalmoscope in 1850. Villette is

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