Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is one of the most famous novels in the world; its heroine’s spirited response to hardship and temptation has engaged an eager readership since its publication in 1847. Jane Eyre, however, was not Charlotte Bronte’s only novel, and Patsy Stoneman’s book traces the development of her work from her exuberant early writing to her disturbing last work, Villette. A final chapter considers Charlotte Bronte’s shifting popular and academic reputation and the various adaptations and imitations of her work. Reading the novels in the context of Charlotte Bronte’s life and times, Stoneman emphasises her persistent engagement with power relations – within families, between classes and between men and women – and the changing narrative strategies with which she explores them. While keeping close to the words of the page, the book is informed by the critical perspectives of feminism, cultural materialism and postcolonialism.

European Intertexts is the first fruit of an ongoing collaborative study aiming to challenge the isolationism of much critical work on English literature by exploring the interdependence of English and continental European literatures in writing by women. While later volumes will deal with specific texts, this introductory volume provides a descriptive framework and a theoretical basis for studies in the field. Covering issues such as the role of English as a world language, the definition of 'Europe', and the current state of Translation Studies, the book also surveys theories of intertextuality and demonstrates intertextual links between written and visual and film texts. This book is itself pioneering in making a systematic approach to women's writings in English in the context of other European cultures. Although Europe is a political reality, this cultural interpenetration remains largely unexamined, and these essays represent an important first step towards revealing that unexplored richness.

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Product Description: This work considers the ways in which two famous Bronte novels have passed into the general culture, including stage, film and television versions, book illustrations, comic books and paintings, operatic, ballet and musical versions, parodies, allusion, all kinds of incidental references, and also later "re-workings" of the original plot...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)