Kirjahaku

Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) each offer a fascinating account of the relation between gender and power in nineteenth-century Britain. While Brontë’s first novel focuses on the governess and education, it shares, with The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a concern with female disempowerment and the ways in which forms of tyranny can be resisted. Through her inscriptions of the complex intersections of gender, class, sexuality and education, it becomes clear that Anne Brontë articulates and interrogates those issues which still remain crucial to feminist debates at the close of the twentieth-century. Drawing upon recent literary and critical scholarship, Betty Jay sets out to re-evaluate Brontë’s novels by arguing that this engagement is as incisive as it is compelling. The need to re-appraise Brontë’s work in the light of contemporary critical discourse also extends to include her poetry. To this end, close textual readings of a selection of the poems show the extent to which the simplicity and sentiment conventionally ascribed to the verse deceive the reader, working to conceal Anne Brontë’s more intricate and powerful poetics of subjectivity and loss.

A Passage to India (1924), the last of E. M. Forster's novels to be published in his lifetime, became an immediate bestseller and also met with critical acclaim for its moral and political commentary on the crossings between individuals and cultures in the India of the British Empire. Forster's record of the terrible consequences of failed connection, of the unexpected upheavals that unsettle the calm of middle-class life, and of the challenges to the ideological foundations of Empire draw their strength from the novel's blend of intense realism and complex narrative technique. In this Readers' Guide, Betty Jay considers the establishment of Forster's reputation and the various attempts of critics to decipher the complex codes that are a feature of his novel. Successive chapters focus on debates around Forster's liberal-humanism, with essays from F. R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling and Malcolm Bradbury; on the indeterminacy and ambiguity of the text, with extracts from essays by Gillian Beer, Robert Barratt, Wendy Moffat and Jo-Ann Hoeppner Moran; and on the sexual politics of Forster's work, with writings from Elaine Showalter, Frances L. Restuccia and Eve Dawkins Poll. The Guide concludes with essays from Jeffrey Meyers and Jenny Sharpe, who read A Passage to India in terms of its engagement with British imperialism.

This book focuses on the mother-daughter relationship as it features in a number of films from the 1990s onwards. Bringing the insights of psychoanalysis and feminism to bear on a diverse and compelling range of representations of the mother-daughter dynamic, the author addresses a range of questions relating to the social, historical and cultural conditions which go to inform the female experience. These include, in relation to Dolores Claiborne, Heavenly Creatures and The Others, an exploration of different forms of familial violence and resistance to it and in One True Thing, Stepmom and Pieces of April, questions about the construction of the ideal mother and her loss. From The Piano’s engagement with French feminism and Losing Chase’s reworking of the life and work of Virginia Woolf to the depiction of cross-racial relationships during apartheid in Friends, the films that go to make up this study all share a central concern with both the literal and symbolic forms that the mother-daughter relationship encompasses.