1,720,999 research outputs found
The Edinburgh Companion to the Brontës and the Arts
No full textThis chapter discusses Anne Brontë’s own drawings alongside an analysis of the role of the artist in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. A Künstlerroman, the novel depicts the artist-heroine, Helen, maturing as an artist as she gains knowledge of the world. It includes several examples of ekphrasis and the detailed descriptions of paintings and drawings are analysed in relation to Anne Brontë’s own interest in the technical challenges of representing the natural world. Most of Anne’s surviving artworks display her fascination with landscape and nature, subjects that preoccupy her artist-heroine. In the novel, Helen labours to produce commercial paintings of landscapes and seascapes that accord with her artistic vision, an indication of the author’s interest in the opportunities available to women to gain financial independence by means of creative labour. This theme makes The Tenant of Wildfell Hall an unusual novel for its time.Unfunde
The Edinburgh Companion to the Brontës and the Arts
No full textThis chapter explores the relationships between the work of the Brontë sisters and their illustrators, from the first illustrated edition in 1872 of Jane Eyre to the 2022 graphic reimagining Glass Town by Isabel Greenberg. The chapter also considers the sisters as illustrators of their own writings, contextualising Emily Brontë’s diary papers as unique visualisations of the Brontës at work, which point simultaneously to their lives in Haworth Parsonage and their creativity as writers and artists. This is accompanied by an outline of the complex history of book illustration involving commercial imperatives that emphasise the Brontës’ novels as popular romances, along with both serious and comic attempts to reconfigure or revise aspects of their narratives. The work of each illustrator, unsurprisingly, speaks to their own time rather than reflecting the period when the Brontës’ works were first published. The chapter maps the ways in which illustrators have subsequently elided the sisters’ biographies, works and the landscapes (real and imagined) in which they lived and in which their works were set, contributing to the creation of hybrid identities that remain current, popular and profitable today.Unfunde
The Edinburgh Companion to the Brontës and the Arts
No full textThis chapter introduces the wider historical and cultural contexts of the Brontë family’s engagement with the arts, which include painting, drawing sculpture, music, literature, theatre, architecture, design and crafts. It demonstrates how this engagement permeated their creative work, leading to the development of an aesthetic sensibility which today is identified as recognisably ‘Brontëan’, an approach which privileges imaginative exploration and a heightened engagement with the workings of the interior life. The chapter demonstrates how the aesthetic discourses of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries informed the Brontës’ understanding of their cultural moment, helping to shape their development as writers and artists, focusing on Branwell’s portrait of his sisters in the National Portrait Gallery, London. The chapter also offers critical assessments of the influence of the arts on the family’s creative work, as well as the important role played by art in the heritage and tourism industries associated with the Brontës’ lives and legacies. This chapter highlights the book’s unique contribution to existing scholarship in Brontë studies. The Introduction also presents an overview of subsequent chapters, demonstrating how each contributor’s discussion relates to the book’s overall rationale and design.Unfunde
Images of the witch in nineteenth-century culture
Get PDFThis thesis examines the witch imagery used during the nineteenth century in children’s literature, realist and gothic fiction, poetry and art, and by practitioners and critics of mesmerism, spiritualism and alternative spirituality. The thesis is based on close readings of nineteenth-century texts and detailed analysis of artwork, but also takes a long view of nineteenth-century witch imagery in relation to that of preceding and succeeding periods. I explore the means by which the image of the witch was introduced as an overt or covert figure into the work of nineteenth-century writers and artists during a period when the majority of literate people no longer believed in the existence of witchcraft; and I investigate the relationship between the metaphorical witch and the areas of social dissonance which she is used to symbolise. I demonstrate that the diversity of nineteenth-century witch imagery is very wide, but that there is a tendency for positive images to increase as the century progresses. Thereby the limited iconography of malevolent witches and powerless victims of witch-hunts, promulgated by seventeenth-century witch-hunters and eighteenth-century rationalist philosophers respectively, were joined by wise-women, fairy godmothers, sorceresses, and mythical immortals, all of whom were defined, directly or indirectly, as witches. Nonetheless I also reveal that every image of the witch I examine has a dark shadow, despite or because of the empathy between witch and creator which is evident in many of the works I have studied. In the Introduction I acknowledge the validity of theories put forward by historians regarding the influence of societal changes on the decline of witchcraft belief, but I argue that those changes also created the need for metaphorical witchery to address the anxieties created by those changes. I contend that the complexity of social change occurring during and prior to the nineteenth century resulted in an increase in the diversification of witch imagery. I argue that the use of diverse images in various cultural forms was facilitated by the growth of liberal individualism which allowed each writer or artist to articulate specific concerns through discrete images of the witch which were no longer coloured solely by the dictates of superstition or rationalism. I look at the peculiar ability of the witch as a symbolic outcast from society to view that society from an external perspective and to use the voice of the exile to say the unsayable. I also use definitions garnered from a wide spectrum of sources from cultural history to folklore and neo-paganism to justify my broad definition of the word ‘witch’. In Chapter One I explore children’s literature, on the assumption that images absorbed during childhood would influence both the conscious and unconscious witch imagery produced by the adult imagination. I find the templates for familiar imagery in collections of folklore and, primarily, in translations of ‘traditional’ fairy tales sanitised for the nursery by collectors such as Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. I then examine fantasies created for Victorian children by authors such as Mary de Morgan, William Makepeace Thackeray, George MacDonald and Charles Kingsley, where the image of witch and fairy godmother is conflated in fiction which elevates the didactic fairy tale to a level which in some cases is imbued with a neo-platonic religiosity, thereby transforming the witch into a powerful portal to the divine. In contrast the canonical novelists whose work I examine in Chapter Two generally project witch imagery obliquely onto foolish, misguided, doomed or defiant women whose witchery is both allusionary and illusionary. I begin with the work of Sir Walter Scott whose bad or sad witches touch his novels with the supernatural while he denies their magic. Scott’s witch imagery, like that of Perrault and Grimm, is reflected in the witches who represent women’s exclusion from autonomy, education and/or the literary establishment in the works of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. Traditional fairy-tale imagery is particularly evident in Charles Dickens’ use of the witch to represent negative aspects in the development of society or the individual. In contrast Scott’s impulse to distance himself from the pre-urban world represented by his witches contrasts with Thomas Hardy’s mourning of the female earth spirits of Wessex, thereby linking fluctuating and evolving images of nature with images of the nineteenth-century witch. In Chapter Three I explore poetry and art through Romantic verse, Tennyson’s Camelot, Rossetti and Burne-Jones’ Pre-Raphaelite classicism, Rosamund Marriot Watson and Mary Coleridge’s shape-shifting, mirrored women, and Yeats’ Celtic Twilight: in doing so I find representations of the witch as the destructive seductress, the muse, the dark ‘other’ of the suppressed poet, the symbol of spellbinding amoral nature, and the embodiment of the Celtic soul. In the final chapter witch imagery is attached to actual practitioners of so-called ‘New Witchcraft’, yet they also become part of a story which seeks to equate neo/quasi science with the supernatural. I demonstrate a gender realignment of occult power as the submissive mesmerist’s tool evolves into the powerful mother/priestess. I note the interconnectedness of fiction and fact via the novels of authors such as Wilkie Collins and Edward Bulwer-Lytton; and identify the role of the campaigning godmother figure as a precursor of the radical feminist Wiccan. I believe that my thesis offers a uniquely comprehensive view of the use of metaphorical witch imagery in the nineteenth century
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
The Dandy in the pink waistcoat: Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Journal of a Frenchman’
Get PDF© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.This essay considers Charlotte Brontë’s serialised ‘Journal of a Frenchman’ in her ‘Young Men’s Magazine’. It discusses the representation of Parisian life, showing how this missing fragment fits into the series and the wider context of Charlotte’s engagement with the French language and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the latter providing the inspiration for many aspects of the Frenchman’s account of his life.Unfunde
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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