The Brontes & Critical Close Reading

1. The Brontes& Critical Close Reading The Other Victorians

2. Summary • Evidence • Stakes • Close Reading Critical Close Reading Assignment

3. “The process of emergence, in such conditions, is then a constantly repeated, an always renewable, move beyond a phase of practical incorporation: usually made difficult by the fact that much incorporation looks like recognition, acknowledgement, and thus a form of acceptance. (RW, “D,R,E”, p. 124-5) Test case 1

4. “The resources of the previously oppressed … are not lost or wiped out through the structures of oppression that helped to define them: they are preserved somewhere, in the past itself, with effects and traces that can be animated in a number of different contexts and terms in the present.” EG, The Nick of Time, 257 Test Case 2

6. Size of a credit card 19 pages long Story of murder & insanity “Young Men’s Magazine No 2.” (Charlotte hand-copied the contents of periodicals onto hand-cut pages)

8. Map of Glass Town, Angria, by Branwell Bronte, 1831

9. “Glass Town and Angrian Saga” • (Charlotte, Branwell) • Reconstructible, available in Oxford World’s Classics • Gondal Saga • Emily, Anne • Unreconstructible, only poetic fragments Sagas / Fictional Worlds

10. “One day, in Autumn of 1845, I accidentally lighted on an MS volume of verse in my sister Emily’s handwriting. Of course, I was not surprised, knowing that she could and did write verse: I looked it over, and something more than surprise seized me – a deep conviction that these were not common effusions, nor at all like the poetry women generally write. I thought them condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine. To my ear they also had a peculiar music – wild, melancholy, and elevating.” • “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell,” in Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, 1850. Charlotte Bronte: