Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology

Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology
Author: Sally Shuttleworth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 1996-03-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0521551498

This innovative and critically acclaimed study successfully challenges the traditional view that Charlotte Brontë existed in a historical vacuum, by setting her work firmly within the context of Victorian psychological debate. Based on extensive local research, using texts ranging from local newspaper copy to the medical tomes in the Reverend Patrick Brontë's library, Sally Shuttleworth explores the interpenetration of economic, social, and psychological discourse in the early and mid-nineteenth century, and traces the ways in which Charlotte Brontë's texts operate in relation to this complex, often contradictory, discursive framework. Shuttleworth offers a detailed analysis of Brontë's fiction, informed by a new understanding of Victorian constructions of sexuality and insanity, and the operations of medical and psychological surveillance.

Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology

Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology
Author: Sally Shuttleworth
Publisher:
Total Pages: 289
Release: 1996
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780511001017

Charlotte Bronte's fiction is examined in the context of Victorian constructions of psychology, sexuality, and insanity."

Charlotte Brontë and Sexuality

Charlotte Brontë and Sexuality
Author: Maynard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1987-01-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521335874

This book raises fundamental questions about our understanding of Victorian sexuality. Charlotte Brontë was no 'other Victorian' living out a secret life in a sexual underworld, but she did centre her life's work on exploring the complexities of our sexual nature. John Maynard shows how Brontë's early stories and novelettes, written from her teens to young maturity for a private audience of her sisters and brother, deal openly with a 'world below' of consuming passion, adultery, seduction, promiscuity, frigidity and incest. He traces how these themes are incorporated into Brontë's mature published work, where her psychological insight into the complexities of sexual need finds its consummate expression. Brontë's mature novels, especially Jane Eyre and Villette offer an intensely felt but finely realised vision of sexual awakening. They are however, deeply aware of the difficulties that beset sexual experience. Unlike a number of studies, this book stresses the insight, achievement and artistic mastery of Charlotte Brontë, who still challenges us to comprehend the subtleties and complexities of her impressively articulated discourse on sexuality.

Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë
Author: Patsy Stoneman
Publisher: Northcote House Pub Limited
Total Pages: 129
Release: 2013
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0746308566

Patsy Stoneman offers a comprehensive analysis of all Charlotte Brontë's novels, with a focus on power-relations in class and gender.

Dickens and Victorian Psychology

Dickens and Victorian Psychology
Author: Tyson Stolte
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2022-07-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0192674269

Dickens and Victorian Psychology: Introspection, First-Person Narration, and the Mind positions Charles Dickens's fiction in the midst of Victorian psychological debate, tracking Dickens's increasing reliance over the course of his career on the introspective mode, those moments—from free indirect discourse to first-person narration—in which Dickens attempts to represent the inner view of his characters' minds. In the middle of the nineteenth century, introspection remained the central investigative method for dualist psychologies, theories that tied the mind's immortality to its immateriality. Because those psychologies found evidence of the mind's ontological difference from the body in the subjective experience of consciousness, this book argues that the moments of inwardness in Dickens's fiction, in both their form and their content, constitute efforts to resist the encroachment of psycho-physiology by making a case for the mind's transcendence of the body. Yet Dickens and Victorian Psychology also shows the consequences of a material psychology's appropriation of such an inward view—as well as the results of the efforts by psycho-physiologists to redefine the terminology of a mainstream dualism—by tracing the ambiguities and contradictions that find their way into Dickens's representations of the mind. In these ways, this book reveals an overlooked context for Dickens's experiments with narrative point of view and broadens our understanding of the strategies that a material psychology used to assuage the anxieties of those who saw psycho-physiology as a threat to immortality.

Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel

Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel
Author: Timothy Gao
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2021-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108837166

Virtual, paracosmic, fictional -- Authorship, omnipotence, and Charlotte Bronte -- Plotting, improvisation, and Anthony Trollope -- Continuation, attachment, and William Makepeace Thackeray -- Description, projection, and Charles.

Vagrancy in the Victorian Age

Vagrancy in the Victorian Age
Author: Alistair Robinson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2021-10-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009022393

Vagrants were everywhere in Victorian culture. They wandered through novels and newspapers, photographs, poems and periodicals, oil paintings and illustrations. They appeared in a variety of forms in a variety of places: Gypsies and hawkers tramped the country, casual paupers and loafers lingered in the city, and vagabonds and beachcombers roved the colonial frontiers. Uncovering the rich Victorian taxonomy of nineteenth-century vagrancy for the first time, this interdisciplinary study examines how assumptions about class, gender, race and environment shaped a series of distinct vagrant types. At the same time it broaches new ground by demonstrating that rural and urban conceptions of vagrancy were repurposed in colonial contexts. Representational strategies circulated globally as well as locally, and were used to articulate shifting fantasies and anxieties about mobility, poverty and homelessness. These are traced through an extensive corpus of canonical, ephemeral and popular texts as well as a variety of visual forms.

Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre

Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre
Author: Sara Lodge
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2008-11-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137086033

Sara Lodge offers a lively introduction to the critical history of one of the most widely-studied nineteenth-century novels, from the first reviews through to present day responses. The Guide also includes sections devoted to feminist, Marxist and postcolonial criticism of Jane Eyre, as well as analysis of recent developments.

Charlotte Brontë, Embodiment and the Material World

Charlotte Brontë, Embodiment and the Material World
Author: Justine Pizzo
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2020-06-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030348555

Comprising nine original essays by specialists in material culture, book history, literary criticism and curatorial and archival studies, this co-edited volume addresses a wide range of Brontë’s writing—from vignettes composed during her teenage years (“The Tea Party” and “The Secret”) to completed novels (The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette) and unfinished works (“Ashworth” and “Emma”). In bringing to life the surprising array of embodied experiences that shaped Brontë’s creative practice (from writing to book-making, painting, and drawing), Charlotte Brontë, Embodiment and the Material World forges new connections between historical, material, and textual approaches to the author’s work.

Charlotte Brontë: The Imagination in History

Charlotte Brontë: The Imagination in History
Author: Heather Glen
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2004-03-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191515159

This stimulating study of Charlotte Brontë's novels draws on extensive original research in a range of early Victorian writings, on subjects ranging from women's day-dreaming to sanitary reform, from the Great Exhibition to early Victorian religious thought. It is not, however, merely a study of context. Through a close consideration of the ways in which Brontë's novels engage with the thinking of their time, it offers a powerful argument for the "literary" as a distinctive mode of intelligence, and reveals a Charlotte Brontë more alert to her historical moment and far more aesthetically sophisticated than she has usually been taken to be. The study will be of interest not only to students of Victorian literature and society, but also to those literary critics and theorists who are beginning to reconsider the nature of the aesthetic and its relation to ideology.