‘Reader, I [shagged/beat/whipped/f****d/rewrote] him’: the sexual and financial afterlives of Jane Eyre

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louisa Yates
Keyword(s):  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Copyright Law ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Financial Success ◽  
Additional Material ◽  
Commercial Success ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
The Erotic

This chapter provides the first comparative reading of neo-Victorian fiction with the erotic makeover novel, a genre that realised commercial success in the immediate aftermath of the wild financial success of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey. Individual makeovers exactly reproduce the text of canonical novels such as Jane Eyre; the only additional material are passages of explicit, often BDSM-inflected, sexual encounters. This chapter examines the brief flare of global interest in the erotic makeover in order to demonstrate the genre’s appropriation of academic neo-Victorian vocabulary. As this chapter argues, such appropriation is deployed in order to obfuscate opportunistic financial imperatives. A comparative reading of Sienna Cartwright’s erotic makeover of Jane Eyre with D.M. Thomas’s neo-Victorian novel Charlotte initiates a dialogue between the two genres across the topics of authorship, fan fiction, copyright law, literary originality and neo-Victoriana. Both genres provide Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre with a curiously commercial afterlife.

QUAKER DRESS, SEXUALITY, AND THE DOMESTICATION OF REFORM IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL

2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 211-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne Keen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Core Function ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

WHY ARE JANE EYRE AND DOROTHEA BROOKE clad by their creators in “Quakerish” garb? The oppositional plainness and simplicity of Quakerish heroines have often been read as signs of classlessness and sexlessness.1 Plain and simple clothing seems, to both Victorian and contemporary eyes, part of the package of reticence, reserve, and repression associated with the evangelical wing of nineteenth-century dissenting sects.2 The typical sociological view of the function of dress within conservative religious groups holds that “strict dress codes are enforced because dress is considered symbolic of religiosity. Hence dress becomes a symbol of social control as it controls the external body” (Arthur 1). The control of female sexuality and the restraint of desire would seem to be the core function of modest clothing. Then the plain dress of some of the liveliest heroines of Victorian fiction presents a puzzle that can be solved only by recuperating the meaning of that clothing for Victorians. As fashion historian Anne Hollander points out, nineteenth-century novels testify to the way that clothes “always correctly express character” (Feeding the Eye 12), but the meaning of particular articles of clothing or styles can slip away. Accurately reading the characters of Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot thus requires careful interpretation of their dress, in this case reversing the conventional reading of their plain, modest, and simple style. This essay argues that Quakerish clothing expresses both a promise of spirited sexuality and an admonition about the class-crossing potential of the respectable female contained within it.

scholarly journals Postcolonial Resistance of Western Imperialist Ideology: Constructing Identities of Others as Violent Savages

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Menia Mohammad Almenia
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Hegemonic Discourse ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Dominant Society ◽  
Binary Division

This paper examines how hegemonic discourse, or the ideology of a dominant society has essentialized, fixed, and divided identities through the construction of binary division of Western’s ideology as civilized and Others as savages. The development of postcolonial theory will be introduced with special consideration to Said’s (1995) theory of Orientalism and Spivak’s (1988) concept of “silencing the Others.” Sample Western literary texts will show a concerted expression of colonial ideology supporting the concept of binary divisions. These will include The Tempest by William Shakespeare (1990), Robinson Crouse by Daniel Defoe (1899), Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (2001), and Passage to India by E. M. Foster (1985). In contrast, literary works by minority authors, mainly postcolonialists, will be examined and considered according to how effectively they resist Western imperialist ideology.

scholarly journals Depicting Women Through Transitivity Choices: A Comparative Analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-59
Author(s):  
Tazanfal Tehseem ◽  
Humera Iqbal ◽  
Saba Zulfiqar
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Systemic Functional Linguistics ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Female Authors

The study aims at depicting how male and female authors portray female characters and how their core ideologies and social influences affect these depictions. This study is based on the feminist stylistic approach, proposed by Sara Mills (1995), embedded with the literary theory of feminism. It is an overlapping field that has its roots in critical discourse analysis. This stance is significant as it allows to critically look at the substance to uncover the ideology related to women. From a feminist stylistic perspective, the notion of presenting the distorted image of the female entity is associated with male authors leading to the point that female authors portray female characters positively as compared to their male counterparts. By employing Halliday’s transitivity framework (2004) in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as an analytic tool, the utterances of the female protagonists from both the novels: The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, have been analysed into the process, participants and circumstances. Social influence, mostly in the form of male domination, on ideologies and linguistic choices in the depiction of women in both the writers’ work has been found on almost equal grounds.

‘Poetry, as I comprehend the word’: Charlotte Brontë’s lyric afterlife

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Barton
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Lyric Voice ◽  
The Feminine

This chapter explores the apparently limited afterlife of Charlotte Brontë’s poetry. Addressing the critical fortunes of the Aylott and Jones collection of 1846 and considering Brontë's discussion of poetry in her letters, it argues that the author incorporates traces of the early poetry into her novels in different guises. Focusing on The Professor, Jane Eyre and Shirley, this chapter proposes Brontë’s fiction as a sequence of experiments in the poetics of the Victorian novel that retrieve and reform the Romantic lyric, granting it a marketable posthumousness and securing the feminine lyric voice for the printed page.

Análise de adaptações cinematográficas baseadas em obras canônicas da literatura: os casos de Jane Eyre e Madame Bovary

2021 ◽  
pp. 14-28
Author(s):  
Cynthia Beatrice Costa
Keyword(s):  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Gustave Flaubert ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Madame Bovary

Clássicos da literatura sempre estiveram presentes nas telas. Dois desses clássicos, Jane Eyre (1847), de Charlotte Brontë, e Madame Bovary (1856), de Gustave Flaubert, acumulam, respectivamente, cerca de 30 e de 15 adaptações televisivas e cinematográficas – uma história multimidiática que impacta a renovação constante desses romances em nosso imaginário.

Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë , Jane Jack , Margaret Smith

1971 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-79
Author(s):  
Robert A. Colby
Keyword(s):  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Jane Eyre

scholarly journals Benefits of quantitative and doctrinal methodological approaches to fan studies research

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Flaherty
Keyword(s):  
Copyright Law ◽  
Fan Studies ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Berne Convention ◽  
Legal Research ◽  
Fair Dealing ◽  
Empirical Research Methods ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
Special Case

This discussion of the main practices of both legal research and fan studies research explores their key differences and similarities to demonstrate that there are important conclusions that can be drawn from the discourse between the two. The methodology of this research into copyright and fan fiction will be used as a case study to demonstrate how well these fields intersect. This research investigates whether transformative works of fan fiction should be covered by the new fair-dealing exception for pastiche within UK copyright law (Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988), similar to parody. To discuss this, my research investigates whether it can be said empirically and doctrinally that fan fiction could be classified as a special case that does not adversely affect the rights holders' interests, as required by Article 13 of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights and Article 9 of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. By adding doctrinal and empirical research methods to fan studies, the argument can be made that fan fiction is not harmful to the underlying work and does not interfere with the copyright holders' normal exploitation of that work, and as such should be permitted as fair dealing.

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