The Bront Novels Routledge Revivals

First published in 1968, this reissue of Dr. Craik’s critical appreciation of the completed novels of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë is seminal for the way in which it shifts emphasis away from the Brontë family biography towards a detailed critical analysis of the novels themselves. Separate chapters are given to each of the seven novels. The author’s aims and techniques in each are assessed and Dr. Craik shows what light the books throw on each other, how they are related to the novels of the Brontë’s predecessors, and how the Brontë novels compare with their great contemporaries in the nineteenth century novel.

How does Victorian fiction represent personality? How does it express emotion and how does it imagine the mind? These questions stand at the centre of Eros and Psyche, first published in 1984. In examining how three authors – Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and George Eliot – depict the mind and organise emotion, Chase approaches their works as expressive structures, and analyses their struggle to accommodate rival imperatives in depicting personality: desire and duty, guilt and innocence, love and autonomy. The title begins with Brontë’s early Angrian tales, which introduce the problem that unifies the book: the attempt of Victorian fiction to escape the constraints of the romance mode, while assimilating its energies. There follow readings of The Pickwick Papers, Jane Eyre, Bleak House, and Middlemarch, in the light of such problems as confinement and exposure in Brontë, tragic doubt in Dickens, and the image of the moral mind in George Eliot.

First published in 1975, this title provides an introduction to the study of the novel. Marjorie Boulton deals systematically with the major elements of plot, character, authorial conventions, narrative structure, and dialogue and distinguishes different types of fiction. The emphasis is on the mainstream novel, with examples and arguments illustrated by quotations from five classics. Of particular value to students of English Literature, this reissue aims to help the reader ‘not only to read novels more discerningly and to discuss them more profitably, but also to relish the reading more’.

First published in 1975, this title provides an introduction to the study of the novel. Marjorie Boulton deals systematically with the major elements of plot, character, authorial conventions, narrative structure, and dialogue and distinguishes different types of fiction. The emphasis is on the mainstream novel, with examples and arguments illustrated by quotations from five classics. Of particular value to students of English Literature, this reissue aims to help the reader ‘not only to read novels more discerningly and to discuss them more profitably, but also to relish the reading more’.

How does Victorian fiction represent personality? How does it express emotion and how does it imagine the mind? These questions stand at the centre of Eros and Psyche, first published in 1984. In examining how three authors – Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and George Eliot – depict the mind and organise emotion, Chase approaches their works as expressive structures, and analyses their struggle to accommodate rival imperatives in depicting personality: desire and duty, guilt and innocence, love and autonomy. The title begins with Brontë’s early Angrian tales, which introduce the problem that unifies the book: the attempt of Victorian fiction to escape the constraints of the romance mode, while assimilating its energies. There follow readings of The Pickwick Papers, Jane Eyre, Bleak House, and Middlemarch, in the light of such problems as confinement and exposure in Brontë, tragic doubt in Dickens, and the image of the moral mind in George Eliot.