Charlotte Brontë

ISBN-13: 9780333922477 / Angielski / Twarda / 2004 / 190 str.

Carl Plasa

Opis

In recent years the work of Charlotte Bronte has undergone a significant reassessment from a postcolonial critical perspective. This book develops current scholarship by providing historically and theoretically informed readings of the full range of her texts, including new analyses of her four best known novels and other less familiar work, such as the Ashanti narratives, the poetry and the Belgian essays.

Spis treści

Acknowledgements.- Introduction.- 'Mingled Gold and Iron': Miscegenation in the Ashanti Narratives.- 'Climes Remote and Strange': Colonialism in the Poetry and Belgian Essays.- 'Mixed up in Foreign Hodge-Podge': Slavery and Sexuality in The Professor.- 'Incongruous Unions': Slavery and the Politics of Metaphor in Jane Eyre .- 'Shamrocks and Potatoes': Embodying the Irish Famine in Shirley.- 'A Thing Double-Existent': Foreigners and Slaves in Villette.- Conclusion.- Notes.- Select Bibliography.- Index.

O autorze

CARL PLASA is Lecturer in Literature at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, University of Wales, UK.

Blurb

The writings of Charlotte Brontë - a member of one of the great literary families - have inspired, fascinated and moved readers ever since their first publication in the mid-nineteenth century. In this new study, Carl Plasa elaborates a series of textually focused, historically grounded and theoretically informed analyses of the full range of the author's texts. As well as providing original readings of Brontë's four best known novels - The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette - attention is given to less familiar and critically neglected areas of Brontë's work, such as the Ashanti narratives, the poetry and the Belgian essays of the early 1840s. Charlotte Brontë's work has undergone a significant reassessment from a postcolonial critical perspective in recent years. By examining Brontë's textual production from its exuberant and experimental beginnings to the formal complexity of Villette, her last completed novel, Plasa offers what is the most comprehensive exploration to date of the shifts in the writer's engagement with the question of colonialism. In so doing, he brings to light the subtle relationships of continuity and transformation between the earlier and later stages of Brontë's literary career and demonstrates the extent to which that career was sparked and driven by her 'colonial imagination'.