The Brontës and the Idea of the Human
Science, Ethics, and the Victorian Imagination

Investigates the idea of the human within Brontë sisters' work, offering new insight on their writing and cultural contexts.

Alexandra Lewis (Edited by)

9781107154810, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 May 2019

310 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.8 cm, 0.64 kg

'Alexandra Lewis's edited collection, The Brontës and the Idea of the Human: Science, Ethics, and the Victorian Imagination, expands this focus from the cultural to the universal.' Lydia Craig, British Association for Victorian Studies Newsletter

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.

Introduction: human subjects: reimagining the Brontës for twenty-first-century scholarship Alexandra Lewis
1. Hanging, crushing, and shooting: animals, violence and child-rearing in Brontë fiction Sally Shuttleworth
2. Learning to imagine Dinah Birch
3. Charlotte Brontë and the science of the imagination Janis McLarren Caldwell
4. Being human: de-gendering mental anxiety
or hysteria, hypochondriasis, and traumatic memory in Charlotte Brontë's Villette Alexandra Lewis
5. Charlotte Brontë and the listening reader Helen Groth
6. Burning art and political resistance: Anne Brontë's radical imaginary of wives, slaves, and animals in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Deborah Denenholz Morse
7. Degraded nature: Wuthering Heights and the last poems of Emily Brontë Helen Small
8. 'Angels … recognize our innocence': on theology and 'human rights' in the fiction of the Brontës Jan-Melissa Schramm
9. 'A strange change approaching': ontology, reconciliation, and eschatology in Wuthering Heights Simon Marsden
10. 'Surely some oracle has been with me': women's prophecy and ethical rebuke in poems by Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë Rebecca Styler
11. Jane Eyre, a teaching experiment Isobel Armstrong
12. Fiction as critique: postcripts to Jane Eyre and Villette Barbara Hardy
13. We are three sisters: the lives of the Brontës as a Chekhovian play Blake Morrison.

Subject Areas: Philosophy of science [PDA], Political ideologies [JPF], Social classes [JFSC], Ethical issues & debates [JFM], Social issues & processes [JFF], Cultural studies [JFC], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Poetry [DC]