While research on autism has sometimes focused on special talents or abilities, autism is typically characterized as impoverished or defective when it comes to language. Autistic Disturbances reveals the ways interpreters have failed to register the real creative valence of autistic language and offers a theoretical framework for understanding the distinctive aesthetics of autistic rhetoric and semiotics. Reinterpreting characteristic autistic verbal practices such as repetition in the context of a more widely respected literary canon, Julia Miele Rodas argues that autistic language is actually an essential part of mainstream literary aesthetics, visible in poetry by Walt Whitman and Gertrude Stein, in novels by Charlotte Brontë and Daniel Defoe, in life writing by Andy Warhol, and even in writing by figures from popular culture.

Autistic Disturbances pursues these resonances and explores the tensions of language and culture that lead to the classification of some verbal expression as disordered while other, similar expression enjoys prized status as literature. It identifies the most characteristic patterns of autistic expression-repetition, monologue, ejaculation, verbal ordering or list-making, and neologism-and adopts new language to describe and reimagine these categories in aesthetically productive terms. In so doing, the book seeks to redress the place of verbal autistic language, to argue for the value and complexity of autistic ways of speaking, and to invite recognition of an obscured tradition of literary autism at the very center of Anglo-American text culture.

Literary Identification from Charlotte Brontë to Tsitsi Dangarembga, by Laura Green, seeks to account for the persistent popularity of the novel of formation, from nineteenth-century English through contemporary Anglophone literature. Through her reading of novels, memoirs, and essays by nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century women writers, Green shows how this genre reproduces itself in the elaboration of bonds between and among readers, characters, and authors that she classifies collectively as “literary identification.” Particular literary identifications may be structured by historical and cultural change or difference, but literary identification continues to undergird the novel of formation in new and evolving contexts.

 

The two nineteenth-century English authors discussed in this book, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, established the conventions of the novel of female formation. Their twentieth-century English descendants, Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, and, Jeanette Winterson, challenge the dominance of heterosexuality in such narratives. In twentieth- and twenty-first-century narratives by Simone de Beauvoir, Jamaica Kincaid, and Tsitsi Dangarembga, the female subject is shaped not only by gender conventions but also by colonial and postcolonial conflict and national identity..

 

For many contemporary critics and theorists, identification is a middlebrow or feminized reading response or a structure that functions to reproduce the middle-class subjectivity and obscure social conflict. However, Green suggests that the range and variability of the literary identifications of authors, readers, and characters within these novels allows such identifications to function variably as well: in liberatory or life-enhancing ways as well as oppressive or reactionary ones.

“Doyle demonstrates that Alcott kept up a running dialogue with her distinguished British counterpart, both contesting and adapting Brontë’s treatments of woment’s spiritual, social, and vocational lives so as to develop her own distinctively American talent.” —Elizabeth Keyser, author of Whispers in the Dark: The Fiction of Louisa May Alcott

“Doyle provides an illuminating discussion of the full range of Louise May Alcott’s writing. Comparisons with Charlotte Brontë spark keen insights into literary traditions and cultural events. General readers will enjoy this book; Alcott and Brontë scholars will need it.” —Beverly Lyon Clark, author of Regendering the School Story: Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys

The work and life of British author Charlotte Brontë fascinated America’s Louisa May Alcott throughout her own literary career. As a nineteenth-century writer struggling with many of the same themes and issues as Brontë, Alcott was drawn toward her British counterpart, but cultural differences created a literary distance between them sometimes as wide as the Atlantic.

In this comparative study, Christine Doyle explores some of the intriguing parallels and differences between the two writers’ backgrounds as she traces specific references to Brontë and her work—not only in Alcott’s children’s fiction, but also in her novels for adults and “sensation fiction.” Doyle compares the treatment of three themes important to both writers—spirituality, interpersonal relations, and women’s work—showing how Alcott translated Brontë’s British reserve and gender- and class-based repression into her own American optimism and progressivism.

In her early career, Alcott was so fascinated by Brontë’s works that she patterned many of her characters on those of Brontë; she later adapted these British elements into a more recognizably American form, producing independent, strong heroines. In observing differences between the writers, Doyle notes that Alcott expresses less anti-Catholic sentiment than does Brontë. She also discusses the authors’ attitudes toward the theater, showing how for Brontë drama is associated with falseness and hypocrisy, while for Alcott it is a profession that expresses possibilities of power and revelation.

Throughout her insightful analysis, Doyle shows that Alcott responds as a uniquely American writer to the problems of American literature and life while never denying the powerful transatlantic influence exerted by Brontë. Doyle’s work reflects a wide range of scholarship, solidly grounded in an understanding of the Victorian temperament, nineteenth-century British and American literature, and recent Alcott criticism and gives fuller voice to the multiple dimensions of Alcott as a nineteenth-century writer.

The Author: Christine Doyle is an associate professor of English at Central Connecticut State University.

While biographers have widely acknowledged the importance of family relationships to Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë and to their writing processes, literary critics have yet to give extensive consideration to the family as a subject of the writing itself. In “We Are Three Sisters,” Drew Lamonica focuses on the role of families in the Brontës’ fictions of personal development, exploring the ways in which their writings recognize the family as a defining community for selfhood.

 

 

Drawing on extensive primary sources, including works by Sarah Ellis, Sarah Lewis, Ann Richelieu Lamb, Harriet Martineau, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell, Lamonica examines the dialogic relationship between the Brontës’ novels and a mid-Victorian domestic ideology that held the family to be the principal nurturer of subjectivity. Using a sociohistorical framework, “We Are Three Sisters” shows that the Brontës’ novels display a heightened awareness of contemporary female experience and the complex problems of securing a valued sense of selfhood not wholly dependent on family ties.

 

 

The opening chapters discuss the mid-Victorian “culture of the family,” in which the Brontës emerged as voices exploring the adequacy of the family as the site for personal, and particularly female, development. These chapters also introduce the Brontës’ early collaborative writings, showing that the sisters’ shared interest in the family’s formative role arose from their own experience as a family of authors. Lamonica also examines the seldom-recognized influences of Patrick and Branwell Brontë on the development of the sisters’ writing.

 

 

        Of the numerous studies on the Brontës, comparatively few consider all seven novels, and no previous study has undertaken to examine the Brontës’ writing in the context of mid-Victorian ideas regarding the family—its relationships, roles, and responsibilities. Lamonica explores in detail the various constructions of family in the sisters’ novels, concluding that the Brontës were attuned to complexities; they were not polemical writers with fixed feminist agendas.

The Brontës disputed the promotion of the family as the exclusive site for female development, morality, and fulfillment, without ever explicitly denying the possibility of domestic contentment. In doing so, the Brontës continue to challenge our readings and our understanding of them as mid-Victorian women. “We Are Three Sisters” is an important addition to the study of these fascinating women and their novels.