Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre
TeenYoung AdultEducation

Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre

by Harold Bloom

Publisher
Infobase Publishing
Pages
244
Language
English
Published
1987

Overview

Edited by Harold Bloom, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is a critical anthology devoted to Brontë's novel rather than a retelling of Jane Eyre itself. The volume places scholarly essays in conversation around the novel's form, moral imagination, social tensions, and unusually forceful first-person voice.

The collection treats Jane's development as more than a sequence of Gothic trials. Its criticism examines how desire, conscience, class, gender, religion, and independence shape both the heroine's choices and the language through which she narrates them. Different contributors can emphasize conflicting elements, allowing the volume to show why the novel supports feminist, historical, psychoanalytic, and formal readings without being exhausted by any one of them.

As a guide to interpretation, the book is most useful when the essays disagree. Bloom's editorial frame introduces a tradition of criticism; the assembled arguments reveal how a canonical work changes under new questions. The anthology therefore belongs beside the novel, not in its place: it maps debates generated by Jane Eyre and demonstrates how critical reading turns familiar scenes into contested evidence.

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1 posts from the Bookspace community

aycan@opheliaaa· 3mo🇹🇷

do you think i am an automaton? — a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? do you think, because i am poor, obscure, plain, and little, i am soulless and heartless? you think wrong! — i have as much soul as you — and full as much heart! and if god had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, i should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. i am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at god’s feet, equal — as we are!

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