Charlotte Bronte Victorian Psychol: 7 (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Series Number 7)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 1/12/2008
EAN 9780521617178, ISBN10: 0521617170
Paperback, 308 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm
Language: English
This innovative and critically acclaimed study successfully challenges the traditional view that Charlotte Brontë existed in a historical vacuum, by setting her work firmly within the context of Victorian psychological debate. Based on extensive local research, using texts ranging from local newspaper copy to the medical tomes in the Reverend Patrick Brontë's library, Sally Shuttleworth explores the interpenetration of economic, social, and psychological discourse in the early and mid-nineteenth century, and traces the ways in which Charlotte Brontë's texts operate in relation to this complex, often contradictory, discursive framework. Shuttleworth offers a detailed analysis of Brontë's fiction, informed by a new understanding of Victorian constructions of sexuality and insanity, and the operations of medical and psychological surveillance.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I. Psychological Discourse in the Victorian Era
1. The art of surveillance
2. The Haworth context
3. Insanity and selfhood
4. Reading the mind
physiognomy and phrenology
5. The female bodily economy
Part II. Charlotte Brontës Fiction
6. The early writings
penetrating power
7. The Professor
'the art of self-control'
8. Jane Eyre
'lurid hieroglyphics'
9. Shirley
bodies and markets
10. Villette
'the surveillance of a sleepless eye'
Conclusion
Notes
Index.
'Invokes primary sources to explode any persistent myths that Brontë lived in a cultural vacuum.' New Scientist