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Zusatztext ... a welcome and significant addition to the recent book-length studies of Charlotte Brontë's work. Klappentext This stimulating study considers how Charlotte Bront 's writings engage with a whole range of issues in their time. Through a series of new readings of ostensibly well-known texts, Heather Glen reveals a Charlotte Bront more alert to her historical moment and far more aesthetically sophisticated than she has usually been taken to be. Zusammenfassung 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. Inhaltsverzeichnis Introduction 1: The mighty phantasm 2: 'Calculated abruptness': The Professor 3: Triumph and jeopardy: the shape of Jane Eyre 4: 'Dreadful to me': Jane Eyre and history (1) 5: 'Incident, life, fire, feeling': Jane Eyre and history (2) 6: The terrible handwriting: Shirley 7: 'Entirely bewildered': Villette and history (1) 8: 'The prism of pain': Villette and history (2) Epilogue Index