Book 1287 views
Emily Brontë
Steven Vine
Pages: 1 - 178
Swansea University Author: Steven Vine
Abstract
The book begins with an examination of Brontë’s life, considering the meaning of the ‘silence’ in which she lived and the illnesses into which she plunged when away from home. Building on recent feminist criticism, it shows how Brontë’s life can be read as a silent demand for emancipation. Later cha...
| Published: |
Twayne
New York
1998
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa17968 |
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| Abstract: |
The book begins with an examination of Brontë’s life, considering the meaning of the ‘silence’ in which she lived and the illnesses into which she plunged when away from home. Building on recent feminist criticism, it shows how Brontë’s life can be read as a silent demand for emancipation. Later chapters examine Brontë’s strategies of self-reinvention in the imaginary world of ‘Gondal’, her struggle with patriarchal literary tradition and cultural orthodoxy in her poems, and her searching critique of Victorian cultural mores in her French essays, or devoirs. A chapter on 'Wuthering Heights' sees the novel as a radical text that, in relation to its revolutionary historical context and treatment of the politics of gendered identity, shakes the ideological forms of the Victorian world. The last chapter offers an account of the ways Brontë has been shaped by critical tradition. What marks the book out is its treatment of the ‘ghostliness’ of Emily Brontë’s writing. Relating the phantoms and spectres of the poetry and 'Wuthering Heights' to the dynamics of mourning theorised in psychoanalysis, the book presents a new understanding of the ‘supernatural’ elements of Brontë’s work. |
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| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Start Page: |
1 |
| End Page: |
178 |