Containing a selection of the best of Charlotte Bronte's early creative writing transcribed directly from her manuscripts, here is an enlightening look at what Bronte called her "long apprenticeship in writing". In the Introduction, Juliet Barker illuminates Bronte's childhood, bringing to life the imaginary worlds and delightful characters Charlotte and her siblings created.
The extraordinary works of the three sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë have entranced and challenged scholars, students, and general readers for the past 150 years. This Companion offers a fascinating introduction to those works, including two of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century - Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights. In a series of original essays, contributors explore the roots of the sisters' achievement in early nineteenth-century Haworth, and the childhood 'plays' they developed; they set these writings within the context of a wider history, and show how each sister engages with some of the central issues of her time. The essays also consider the meaning and significance of the Brontës' enduring popular appeal. A detailed chronology and guides to further reading provide further reference material, making this a volume indispensable for scholars and students, and all those interested in the Brontës and their work.
Composed of serialized works, poems, short tales, and novellas, Charlotte Brontë's juvenilia merit serious scholarly attention as revelatory works in and of themselves as well as for what they tell us about the development of Brontë as a writer. This timely collection attends to both critical strands, positioning Brontë as an author whose career encompassed the Romantic and Victorian eras and delving into the developing nineteenth century's literary concerns as well as the growth of the writer's mind. As the contributors show, Brontë's authorship took shape among the pages of her juvenilia, as figures from Brontë's childhood experience of the world such as Wellington and Napoleon transmuted to her fictional pages, while her siblings' works and worlds both overlapped with and extended beyond her own.
Conceived as a literary form to aggressively publicize the abolitionist cause in the United States, the African American slave narrative remains a powerful and illuminating demonstration of America's dark history. Yet the genre's impact extended far beyond the borders of the U.S. In a period when few books sold more than five hundred copies, slave narratives sold in the tens of thousands, providing British readers vivid accounts of the violence and privation experienced by American slaves. Eloquent, bracing narratives by Frederick Douglass, William Box Brown, Solomon Northrop, and others enjoyed unprecedented popularity, captivating audiences that included activists, journalists, and some of the era's greatest novelists. The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel investigates the shaping influence of the American slave narrative on the Victorian novel in the years between the British Abolition Act and the American Emancipation Proclamation. The book argues that Charlotte Brontë, W. M. Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, and Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson integrated into their works generic elements of the slave narrative-from the emphasis on literacy as a tool of liberation, to the teleological journey from slavery to freedom, to the ethics of resistance over submission. It contends that Victorian novelists used these tropes in an attempt to access the slave narrative's paradigm of resistance, illuminate the transnational dimension of slavery, and articulate Britain's role in the global community. Through a deft use of disparate sources, Lee reveals how the slave narrative becomes part of the textual network of the English novel, making visible how black literary, as well as economic, production contributed to English culture. Lucidly written, richly researched, and cogently argued, Julia Sun-Joo Lee's insightful monograph makes an invaluable contribution to scholars of American literary history, African American literature, and the Victorian novel, in addition to highlighting the vibrant transatlantic exchange of ideas that illuminated literatures on both sides of the Atlantic during the nineteenth century.
The first volume devoted to literary pirates in the nineteenth century, this collection examines changes in the representation of the pirate from the beginning of the nineteenth century through the late Victorian period. Gone were the dangerous ruffians of the eighteenth-century novel and in their place emerged a set of brooding and lovable rogues, as exemplified by Byron's Corsair. As the contributors engage with acts of piracy by men and women in the literary marketplace as well as on the high seas, they show that both forms were foundational in the promotion and execution of Britain's imperial ambitions. Linking the pirate's development as a literary figure with the history of piracy and the making of the modern state tells us much about race, class, and evolving gender relationships. While individual chapters examine key texts like Treasure Island, Dickens's 1857 'mutiny' story in Household Words, and Peter Pan, the collection as a whole interrogates the growth of pirate myths and folklore throughout the nineteenth century and the depiction of their nautical heirs in contemporary literature and culture.
This book explores the representations of militarisim and masculinity in Charlotte and Branwell Brontë’s youthful writings. It offers insight into how the siblings understood and reimagined conflict (both local and overseas) and its emotional legacies whilst growing up in early-nineteenth-century Britain. Their writings shed new light on a period little discussed by social and military historians, providing not only a new approach to Brontë Studies, but also acting as a familial case study for how the media captivated and enticed the public imagination.
'We pretended we had each a large island inhabited by people 6 miles high.' In their collaborative early writings the Brontës created and peopled the most extraordinary fantasy worlds, whose geography and history they elaborated in numerous stories, poems, and plays. Together they invented characters based on heroes and writers such as Wellington, Napoleon, Scott, and Byron, whose feuds, alliances, and love affairs weave an intricate web of social and political intrigue in imaginary colonial lands in Africa and the Pacific Ocean. The writings of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal are youthful experiments in imitation and parody, wild romance and realistic recording; they demonstrate the playful literary world that provided a 'myth kitty' for their early - and later - work. In this generous selection the writings of Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell are presented together for the first time. The Introduction explores the rich imaginative lives of the Brontës, and the tension between their maturing authorship and creative freedom. The edition also includes Charlotte Brontë's Roe Head Journal, and Emily and Anne's Diary Papers, important autobiographical sources. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
A Brontë Encyclopedia is an A- Z encyclopedia of the most notable literary family of the 19th century highlighting original literary insights and the significant people and places that influenced the Brontës’ lives. Comprises approximately 2,000 alphabetically arranged entries Defines and describes the Brontës' fictional characters and settings Incorporates original literary judgements and analyses of characters and motives Includes coverage of Charlotte's unfinished novels and her and Branwell's juvenile writings Features over 60 illustrations
In her study of Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Martineau and George Eliot, Lesa Scholl shows how three Victorian women writers broadened their capacity for literary professionalism by participating in translation and other conventionally derivative activities such as editing and reviewing early in their careers. In the nineteenth century, a move away from translating Greek and Latin Classical texts in favour of radical French and German philosophical works took place. As England colonised the globe, Continental philosophies penetrated English shores, causing fissures of faith, understanding and cultural stability. The influence of these new texts in England was unprecedented, and Eliot, Brontë and Martineau were instrumental in both literally and figuratively translating these ideas for their English audience. Each was transformed by access to foreign languages and cultures, first through the written word and then by travel to foreign locales, and the effects of this exposure manifest in their journalism, travel writing and fiction. Ultimately, Scholl argues, their study of foreign languages and their translation of foreign-language texts, nations and cultures enabled them to transgress the physical and ideological boundaries imposed by English middle-class conventions.
In 1834, Charlotte Brontë and her brother Branwell created the imaginary kingdom of Angria in a series of tiny handmade books. Continuing their saga some years later, the five 'novelettes' in this volume were written by Charlotte when she was in her early twenties, and depict a aristocratic beau monde in witty, racy and ironic language. She creates an exotic, scandalous atmosphere of intrigue and destructive passions, with a cast ranging from the ageing rake Northangerland and his Byronic son-in-law Zamorna, King of Angria, to Mary Percy, Zamorna's lovesick wife, and Charles Townshend, the cynical, gossipy narrator. Together the tales provide a fascinating glimpse into the mind and creative processes of the young writer who was to become one of the world's great novelists.
