The Brontës and the Idea of the Human

Alexandra Lewis is Senior Lecturer in English Literature, and Director of the Centre for the Novel, at the University of Aberdeen. She is editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Wuthering Heights (2014), and has published extensively on the Brontës, memory and trauma, and nineteenth-century literature and psychology.

• 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.

'This collection of 13 essays offers interdisciplinary perspectives on the Brontës, especially Charlotte … The present volume's close readings of the Brontës' novels lead to fresh insights … Recommended.' S. A. Parker, Choice