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Investigates the idea of the human within Brontë sisters' work, offering new insight on their writing and cultural contexts.
List of contents
Introduction: human subjects: reimagining the Brontës for twenty-first-century scholarship Alexandra Lewis; 1. Hanging, crushing, and shooting: animals, violence and child-rearing in Brontë fiction Sally Shuttleworth; 2. Learning to imagine Dinah Birch; 3. Charlotte Brontë and the science of the imagination Janis McLarren Caldwell; 4. Being human: de-gendering mental anxiety; or hysteria, hypochondriasis, and traumatic memory in Charlotte Brontë's Villette Alexandra Lewis; 5. Charlotte Brontë and the listening reader Helen Groth; 6. Burning art and political resistance: Anne Brontë's radical imaginary of wives, slaves, and animals in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Deborah Denenholz Morse; 7. Degraded nature: Wuthering Heights and the last poems of Emily Brontë Helen Small; 8. 'Angels ... recognize our innocence': on theology and 'human rights' in the fiction of the Brontës Jan-Melissa Schramm; 9. 'A strange change approaching': ontology, reconciliation, and eschatology in Wuthering Heights Simon Marsden; 10. 'Surely some oracle has been with me': women's prophecy and ethical rebuke in poems by Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë Rebecca Styler; 11. Jane Eyre, a teaching experiment Isobel Armstrong; 12. Fiction as critique: postcripts to Jane Eyre and Villette Barbara Hardy; 13. We are three sisters: the lives of the Brontës as a Chekhovian play Blake Morrison.
Summary
Investigating links between literature, science, psychology, religion, law, and ethics, this study re-evaluates nineteenth-century understandings of what it means to be human. Leading scholars argue for the centrality of the idea of the human within the works of the Brontë sisters, offering new insight on their writing and cultural contexts.
