The Brontės and the idea of the human : science, ethics, and the Victorian imagination /
edited by Alexandra Lewis, University of Aberdeen.
- New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2019.
- xiii, 290 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
- Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture .
Includes bibliographical references (pages 269-283) and index.
Introduction: Human subjects: reimagining the Brontės for twenty-first-century scholarship -- Hanging, crushing, and shooting: animals, violence, and child-rearing in Brontė fiction -- Learning to imagine -- Charlotte Brontė and the science of the imagination -- Being human: de-gendering mental anxiety; or hysteria, hypochondriasis, and traumatic memory in Charlotte Brontė's Villette -- Charlotte Brontė and the listening reader -- Burning art and political resistance: Anne Brontė's radical imaginary of wives, slaves, and animals in the Tenant of Wildfell Hall -- Degraded nature: Wuthering Heights and the last poems of Emily Brontė -- 'Angels recognize our innocence': on theology and 'human rights' in the fiction of the Brontės -- 'A strange change approaching': ontology, reconciliation, and eschatology in Wuthering Heights -- 'Surely some oracle has been with me': women's prophecy and ethical rebuke in poems by Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontė -- Jane Eyre, a teaching experiment -- Fiction as critique: postscripts to Jane Eyre and Villette -- We are three sisters: the lives of the Brontės as a Chekhovian play.
"The Brontės and the Idea of the Human: What does it mean to be human? The Brontė novels and poetry are fascinated by what lies at the core - and limits - of the human. The Brontės and the Idea of the Human presents a significant re-evaluation of how Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontė each responded to scientific, legal, political, theological, literary, and cultural concerns in ways that redraw the boundaries of the human for the nineteenth century. Proposing innovative modes of approach for the twenty-first century, leading scholars shed light on the relationship between the role of the imagination and new definitions of the human subject. This important interdisciplinary study scrutinises the notion of the embodied human and moves beyond it to explore the force and potential of the mental and imaginative powers for constructions of selfhood, community, spirituality, degradation, cruelty, and ethical behaviour in the nineteenth century and its fictional worlds"--
9781107154810 9781316608371
2018038592
Brontė family. Bronte, Charlotte, 1816-1855--Criticism and interpretation. Bronte, Anne, 1820-1849--Criticism and interpretation. Bronte, Emily, 1818-1848--Criticism and interpretation.
Authors, English--19th century. English literature--History and criticism.--19th century Humanity in literature.