The Brontës and the Idea of the Human

Science, Ethics, and the Victorian Imagination

Alexandra Lewis

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781107154810
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108216494
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

What does it mean to be human? The Brontë novels and poetry are fascinated by what lies at the core - and limits - of the human. The Brontës and the Idea of the Human presents a significant re-evaluation of how Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë each responded to scientific, legal, political, theological, literary, and cultural concerns in ways that redraw the boundaries of the human for the nineteenth century. Proposing innovative modes of approach for the twenty-first century, leading scholars shed light on the relationship between the role of the imagination and new definitions of the human subject. This important interdisciplinary study scrutinises the notion of the embodied human and moves beyond it to explore the force and potential of the mental and imaginative powers for constructions of selfhood, community, spirituality, degradation, cruelty, and ethical behaviour in the nineteenth century and its fictional worlds.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Imprints Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction. Human Subjects: Reimagining the Brontës for Twenty-First-Century Scholarship
• 1 Hanging, Crushing, and Shooting: Animals, Violence, and Child-Rearing in Brontë Fiction
• 2 Learning to Imagine: The Brontës and Nineteenth-Century Educational Ideals
• 3 Charlotte Brontë and the Science of the Imagination
• 4 Being Human: De-Gendering Mental Anxiety; or Hysteria, Hypochondriasis, and Traumatic Memory in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette
• 5 Charlotte Brontë and the Listening Reader
• 6 Burning Art and Political Resistance: Anne Brontë’s Radical Imaginary of Wives, Enslaved People, and Animals in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
• 7 Degraded Nature: Wuthering Heights and the Last Poems of Emily Brontë
• 8 ‘Angels . . . Recognize Our Innocence’: On Theology and ‘Human Rights’ in the Fiction of the Brontës
• 9 ‘A Strange Change Approaching’: Ontology, Reconciliation, and Eschatology in Wuthering Heights
• 10 ‘Surely Some Oracle Has Been with Me’: Women’s Prophecy and Ethical Rebuke in Poems by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë
• 11 Jane Eyre, A Teaching Experiment
• 12 Fiction as Critique: Postscripts to Jane Eyre and Villette
• 13 We Are Three Sisters: The Lives of the Brontës as a Chekhovian Play
• Bibliography
• Index
• Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture