68 research outputs found
Gendering the comic body: Physical humour in <i>Shirley</i>
No full textThe mock-battles and slap-stick scenes that arise at pivotal moments in Shirley encourage us to reexamine Brontë’s sense of humour, which is neither as grim, nor as naively crude as critics from George Henry Lewes to Virginia Woolf have deemed it. Drawing on Brontë’s engagement with the theatrical traditions of European Carnival and British pantomime, this chapter demonstrates how physical humour in Shirley satirises the gendered dictates of literary realism that Lewes had laid out for the author in public reviews and private correspondence. By rejecting the witty drawing-room comedy often associated with her predecessor Jane Austen, and adopting the brash language of the body common to both popular performance and the work of her male peers Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray, Brontë participates in important mid-nineteenth-century debates about gendered authorship and the literary marketplace.<br/
Atmospheric exceptionalism in Jane Eyre: Charlotte Brontë’s weather wisdom
No full textAs her family name suggests, Jane Eyre is exceptionally responsive to changes in the weather. In her eponymous “autobiography,” Jane’s ability to predict future events and assume an embodied—yet occasionally omniscient—insight alerts us to the ways in which Charlotte Brontë’s fiction leverages the rise of climate science as a basis for successful female authorship. In opposition to the prevailing belief of the Victorian medical establishment that storms prompted hysteria and exacerbated symptoms of women’s biological “periodicity,” Brontë’s first published novel draws the sensitive body and insightful mind of its female protagonist into close alliance. Far from reflecting a nervous pathology, Jane’s empowered responses to the air demonstrate the ways in which meteorological concepts such as weather wisdom and lunarism prove vital to nineteenth-century fiction. (JP
Esther’s ether: atmospheric character in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House
No full textFive chapters after the famous foggy opening of Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853), the novel's protagonist Esther Summerson disappears into thick air. Esther's “darling,” the young orphan Ada Clare, first discloses her companion's climatic dissolution when she celebrates her kind-hearted treatment of the hapless Jellyby children. Although Ada and Esther's guardian John Jarndyce maintains that a shower of “sugar-plums, or three-cornered raspberry tarts,” might be a suitable remedy for the children's neglect, Ada contradicts this proposition when she makes the odd claim, “It did better than that. It rained Esther” (61). This assertion that Esther's precipitated personhood is a “better” palliative than an abundance of sugared confections undoubtedly evinces Ada's childlike appreciation of her companion's effusive goodness. Within the larger scope of the novel, however, the remarkable notion that Esther's seemingly embodied actions and emotions are equivalent to rain, raises an unexpected but essential question: To what ends does Dickens's protagonist evaporate into the dense atmosphere we traditionally associate with the setting of Bleak House
Ethereal women: Climate and gender from realism to the modernist novel
No full textThis chapter examines Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (1915–1938) and selections of non-fiction writing by Virginia Woolf published between 1919 and 1925. It argues that the fluid psychology we traditionally associate with twentieth-century experiments in literary form begins with the impact of nineteenth-century climate science on realist fiction. The atmospheric modes of female consciousness and ethereal embodiment that women’s presumed sensitivity to climate engenders in novels like Jane Eyre and Bleak House, thus give rise to later, feminist engagements with female authorship such as Richardson’s and Woolf’s. Taking May Sinclair’s pioneering use of the term ‘stream of consciousness’ to describe Pilgrimage in 1918 as a pivot point, the essay connects Richardson’s acknowledged debt to Villette with the climatic underpinnings that inform Woolf’s responses to both of these novels as well as her famous definition of modern fiction as ‘an incessant shower of innumerable atoms’
Introduction
No full textThis introductory chapter examines the intersections between embodiment, material culture, and Charlotte Brontë’s life and writing. It charts the evolution of Brontë studies following the rise of New Historicism and seminal scholarship from the 1990s and early 2000s by critics and biographers such as Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars, Juliet Barker, Lucasta Miller, Sally Shuttleworth, and Margaret Smith. The chapter goes on to discuss how the “material turn” and recent theories of embodiment inform twenty-first -century approaches to the presentation and reception of Brontë’s art, life, and legacy. Focusing on the interdisciplinary conversations that comprise the volume, the editors discuss how book history, cultural heritage, the history of dress, literary criticism, and museum curation prove vital to understanding the ways in which readers have responded to Brontë’s work from its original publication to the present day
Charlotte Brontë, embodiment and the material world
No full textComprising nine original essays by specialists in material culture, book history, literary criticism, and curatorial and archival studies, this co-edited volume addresses a wide range of Brontë’s writing—from vignettes composed during her teenage years (“The Tea Party” and “The Secret”) to completed novels (The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette) and unfinished works (“Ashworth” and “Emma”). In bringing to life the surprising array of embodied experiences that shaped Brontë’s creative practice (from writing to book-making, painting, and drawing), Charlotte Brontë, Embodiment and the Material World forges new connections between historical, material, and textual approaches to the author’s work.<br/
“Mediocrity in the sensations”: Charlotte Brontë and the Yorkshire Marriage
No full textIn a letter of 1840 to her friend Ellen Nussey, Charlotte Brontë ironically advises that “mediocrity in the sensations is superlative wisdom,” especially in the context of the “Yorkshire marriage” based on wealth, rather than the mutual affinity she sets as her personal ideal. Drawing on the language of embodied subjectivity, this essay focuses on the way Brontë explores, via references to bodily sensation and material objects, the alienating experience of observing the courtship of other people. It considers the purpose of the “thumbnail” marriage sketches in her fiction and her use of brutal imagery to capture the mysteries of sexual attraction as she witnessed them around her
Alle radici del dibattito Post-Growth. La lezione di Emilio Sereni
No full textSi evidenzia il contributo seminale di Emilio Sereni al superamento della dicotomia economico/ecologico in una prospettiva di sviluppo fortemente ancorata al territorio e ai luoghi.
Cinquant’anni prima che si iniziasse a discutere di paradigmi post-growth come alternativa a forme di crescita insostenibili, irresponsabili e in realtà senza sviluppo, Sereni aveva proposto di guardare al paesaggio agrario, con l’evidenza delle sue stratificazioni di saperi plurisecolari, come prospettiva ottimale per riflettere sulla crisi che nel 1962 appare pervadere le forme assunte dal boom economico postbellico: quella diffusa devastazione del territorio che ha condotto, da un lato, all’ipertrofia delle rendite urbane speculative, dall’altro all’abbandono di interi comprensori interni con esiti fortemente intrecciati che, di lì a pochi anni, mostreranno il tragico volto delle alluvioni, del dissesto idrogeologico, della marginalizzazione territoriale.
La sua prospettiva ha per noi una valenza non solo analitica, ma anche interpretativa e propositiva, messa in luce già negli anni ’60 da Italo Insolera che, per la recensione della Storia del paesaggio agrario, scriveva sulle colonne di Urbanistica: “Nel processo di integrazione delle nozioni proprie di diverse discipline che caratterizza l’attuale preparazione culturale in funzione della pianificazione territoriale e della programmazione economica, il testo di Sereni ha un posto insostituibile”. Infatti, “l’autore ha raccolto una serie di appunti mirabilmente precisi su come, nelle varie epoche, l’organizzazione della proprietà e della conduzione generasse certi tipi e modi di coltura e come poi questi trasformassero la natura, o l’eredità delle precedenti generazioni agrarie, fino a quello che è oggi il paesaggio caratteristico delle varie regioni della Penisola”; “un compendio di storia rurale” che “qui ci interessa per la grande importanza che riveste per l’urbanistica”, e che si dovrebbe “intitolare “Saper vedere l’agricoltura”.
Ad accomunare i due studiosi, è il ricorso alla storia come chiave di lettura del presente: Sereni nei termini dell’analisi marxista, Insolera come arena privilegiata di ricerca interdisciplinare per individuare, nel complesso delle trasformazioni strutturali, quelle “invarianti” delle pratiche spaziali che ne rappresentano il patrimonio collettivo, e in quanto tali, il perno dell'azione pianificatoria.Aim of this proposal is to highlight the seminal contribution of Emilio Sereni to overcoming the economic/ecological dichotomy in a development perspective strongly anchored to the territory and places.
Fifty years before post-growth paradigms began to be discussed as an alternative to unsustainable, irresponsible forms of growth, Sereni proposed to look at the agricultural landscape, with the evidence of its centuries-old stratifications of knowledge, as an optimal perspective to reflect on the crisis that in 1962 appears to pervade the forms assumed by the post-war economic boom: that widespread devastation of the territory which led, on the one hand, to the hypertrophy of speculative urban rents, on the other to the abandonment of entire internal districts with strongly intertwined results which, within a few years, will show the tragic face of floods, hydrogeological instability, territorial marginalization.
Sereni perspective has for us an analytical value, and an interpretive and propositional value. Indeed, they have been highlighted already in the 60s by Italo Insolera who, in reviewing for Urbanistica his “Storia del Paesaggio Agrario Italiano”, wrote: "In the process of integration of the notions of different disciplines that characterizes the current cultural preparation as a function of territorial planning and economic programming, Sereni's text has an irreplaceable place”. In fact, "the author has collected a series of admirably precise notes on how, throughtout time, the organization of ownership and management generated certain types and methods of cultivation and how these then transformed nature, or the inheritance of the previous generations of farmers, up to what is today the characteristic landscape of the various regions of the Peninsula”; “a compendium of rural history” which “interests us here due to the great importance it has for urban planning”, and which should be “entitled ‘Learning to see agriculture’”.
What joined the two scholars is the use of history as a key to understanding the present: Sereni in terms of Marxist analysis, Insolera as a privileged arena of interdisciplinary research to identify, in the complex of structural transformations, the "invariant" ones of spatial practices that they represent its collective heritage, and as such, the core of planning action
World War I and the People of the Purchase
No full textTitle: World War I and The People of the Purchase
Author: Cari Mikez
Faculty Mentor: Dr. David Pizzo
Department: Murray State History Department
ABSTRACT
The extensive impacts of World War I pervaded society on a global scale during the early twentieth century. The United States officially joined the international conflict in April of 1917 by aligning with the Triple Entente composed of Britain, France and Russia in the fight against the central European powers of Germany, Austro-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. In a similar fashion as the other warring nations, the American war effort depended on the development of a national ideology and the mobilization of societal resources to support a newly created armed forces. This research project will explore the significant impacts of the American war effort during World War I on the Jackson Purchase home front in Western Kentucky and will also provide an assessment of rural Western Kentucky societal dynamics through an examination of prewar domestic issues, changes to local economic, political, and social processes, and the responses of western Kentuckians to wartime changes. Research for this project was primarily conducted through local public library and local genealogical repositories, as well as oral histories and other special collection materials housed in Pogue Library at Murray State University. Other areas of interest will include: urban/rural dynamic between Jackson purchase population centers and the surrounding counties, civic organizations, racial issues, prohibition, women’s suffrage, education, health care, and the outbreak of the Spanish flu. This project was inspired by the upcoming Centennial of the World War I Armistice signing on November 11, 2018 and the Bicentennial of the ‘purchase’ of the Jackson Purchase region on October 19, 2018. Many topics and issues covered in the paper are still relevant subjects in the twenty-first century
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