Comprising 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 writingfrom 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.

Contributes to the material turn in Victorian studies and to new approaches to sensation and embodiment Looks at the relationship between literary interpretation and historical analysis of the objects she created, handled, and wore Demonstrates how her once physical embodiment continues to haunt her place within the literary canon and popular imagination

Autorentext

Justine Pizzo is a Lecturer in English at the University of Southampton, UK. Her book

project, provisionally titled "The Character of Climate: Woman and Atmosphere

in Victorian Fiction," examines how aerial climates shape female characterization

in mid-nineteenth and early twentieth-century novels. Her essays on Charlotte

Brontë have appeared in PMLA and in a volume on Climate and Literature (ed. Johns-Putra,

2019. published by Cambridge University Press.

Eleanor Houghton read English at the University of Oxford, UK, before being awarded a Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities at the University of Southampton, UK. She has recently completed her doctoral thesis "Charlotte Brontë, 'Plainness' and the Language of Dress" and works as costume consultant and historical advisor for the Brontë Parsonage Museum, UK, and the BBC.

Inhalt

1. Introduction - Eleanor Houghton and Justine Pizzo.- 2. Burying Bertha - Cornelia Pearsall.- 3. Gendering the Comic Body: Physical Humour in Shirley - Justine Pizzo.- 4. Charlotte Bronte and the "Yorkshire Marriage" - Valerie Sanders.- 5. Catholic Things and the Jesuit Order in Villette - Julie Donovan.- 6. Charlotte Bronte: From a Yorkshire Girl to a Regency Writer and Dandy - Judith E. Pike.- 7. Scholarship and Sentimentality in the Museum Context - Christine Nelson.- 8. Charlotte Bronte's Moccasins: The Wild West Brought Home - Eleanor Houghton.- 9. Charlotte Bronte's "Chinese Fac-similes": A Comparative Approach to Interpreting the Materials of Authorial Labour and Artistic Process - Barbara Heritage.- 10. The Materialities of Charlotte Bronte's Medievalism - Claire Broome Saunders.