This new study demonstrates the precision of Brontë's historical setting of Jane Eyre. Thomas addresses the historical worlding of Brontë and her characters, mapping relations of genre and gender across the novel's articulation of questions of imperial history and relations, reform, racialization and the making of Englishness.

This new study demonstrates the precision of Brontë's historical setting of Jane Eyre . Thomas addresses the historical worlding of Brontë and her characters, mapping relations of genre and gender across the novel's articulation of questions of imperial history and relations, reform, racialization and the making of Englishness.

"Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt!" Throughout the hardships of her childhood - spent with a severe aunt and abusive cousin, and later at the austere Lowood charity school - Jane Eyre clings to a sense of self-worth, despite of her treatment from those close to her. At the age of eighteen, sick of her narrow existence, she seeks work as a governess. The monotony of Jane's new life at Thornfield Hall is broken up by the arrival of her peculiar and changeful employer, Mr Rochester. Routine at the mansion is further disrupted by mysterious incidents that draw the pair closer together but which, once explained, threaten Jane's happiness and integrity. A flagship of Victorian fiction, Jane Eyre draws the reader in by the vigour of Jane's voice and the novel's forceful depiction of childhood injustice, of the restraints placed upon women, and the complexities of both faith and passion. The emotional charge of Jane's story is as strong today as it was more than 150 years ago, as she seeks dignity and freedom on her own terms. In this new edition, Juliette Atkinson explores the power of narrative voice and looks at the striking physicality of the novel, which is both shocking and romantic.

Sara Lodge offers a lively introduction to the critical history of one of the most widely-studied nineteenth-century novels, from the first reviews through to present day responses. The Guide also includes sections devoted to feminist, Marxist and postcolonial criticism of Jane Eyre, as well as analysis of recent developments.

Organized thematically around the themes of time, space, and place, this collection examines Charlotte Brontë in relationship to her own historical context and to her later critical reception, takes up the literal and metaphorical spaces of her literary output, and sheds light on place as both a psychic and geographical phenomenon in her novels and their adaptations. Foregrounding both a historical and a broad cultural approach, the contributors also follow the evolution of Brontë's literary reputation in essays that place her work in conversation with authors such as Samuel Richardson, Walter Scott, and George Sand and offer insights into the cultural and critical contexts that influenced her status as a canonical writer. Taken together, the essays in this volume reflect the resurgence of popular and scholarly interest in Charlotte Brontë and the robust expansion of Brontë studies that is currently under way.

Trollope the reformer and the reformation of Trollope scholarship in relation to gender, race, and genre are the intertwined subjects of eminent Trollopian Deborah Denenholz Morse’s radical rethinking of Anthony Trollope. Beginning with a history of Trollope’s critical reception, Morse traces the ways in which Trollope’s responses to the political and social upheavals of the 1860s and 1870s are reflected in his novels. She argues that as Trollope’s ideas about gender and race evolved over those two crucial decades, his politics became more liberal. The first section of the book analyzes these changes in terms of genre. As Morse shows, the novelist subverts and modernizes the quintessential English genre of the pastoral in the wake of Darwin in the early 1860s novel The Small House at Allington. Following the Second Reform Act, he reimagines the marriage plot along new class lines in the early 1870s in Lady Anna. The second section focuses upon gender. In the wake of the Second Reform Bill and the agitations for women's rights in the 1860s and 1870s, Trollope reveals the tragedy of primogeniture and male privilege in Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite and the viciousness of the marriage market in Ayala's Angel. The final section of Reforming Trollope centers upon race. Trollope's response to the Jamaica Rebellion and the ensuing Governor Eyre Controversy in England is revealed in the tragic marriage of a quintessential English gentleman to a dark beauty from the Empire's dominions. The American Civil War and its aftermath led to Trollope's insistence that English identity include the history of English complicity in the black Atlantic slave trade and American slavery, a history Trollope encodes in the creole discourses of the late novel Dr. Wortle's School. Reforming Trollope is a transformative examination of an author too long identified as the epitome of the complacent English gentleman.

Since birth, we have been ensnared in a gendered world. Gender is so deeply ingrained in various aspects of our lives, such as social, political, legal, and economic institutions and the related actions, ideas, and aspirations, that it appears natural. As a result of gender-defined roles and experiences, gendered hierarchies get established. It is crucial to re-examine the fundamental issues of gender, equality, and development from a new perspective. In doing so, this volume puts aside what we are accustomed to and challenges some of our most fundamental assumptions and understandings. It analyses gender not as a given but as a feat, not just as the cause but also as a result, and not only as a person but also as a society, in order to expose and critique the processes that create or reassert the inevitability and naturalness of a gendered reality. The book sketches the basic understanding of gender, its construction, perception of gender, the process of identity formation and socialization, and the kind of influence gender has on society. This volume is a comprehensive resource that gives a new perspective on gender as a key organizing factor within society, it unpacks the social construction of knowledge, categories of difference, and structures of power and inequality, from the viewpoints of researchers and academicians. Researchers, teachers, students, and other groups interested in gender studies, sociology, law, history, and languages will find the book refreshingly handy in their inquiry. The book is a collection of narratives, empirical evidence, and opinion papers along with systematic literature reviews around gender, equality and development.