The Brontës and the Fairy Tale is the first comprehensive study devoted to the role of fairy tales and folklore in the work of Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell Brontë. It intervenes in debates on genre, literary realism, the history of the fairy tale, and the position of women in the Victorian period. Building on recent scholarship emphasizing the dynamic relationship between the fairy tale and other genres in the nineteenth century, the book resituates the Brontës’ engagement with fairy tales in the context of twenty-first-century assumptions that the stories primarily evoke childhood and happy endings. Jessica Campbell argues instead that fairy tales and folklore function across the Brontës’ works as plot and character models, commentaries on gender, and signifiers of national identity.

Scholars have long characterized the fairy tale as a form with tremendous power to influence cultures and individuals. The late twentieth century saw important critical work revealing the sinister aspects of that power, particularly its negative effects on female readers. But such an approach can inadvertently reduce the history of the fairy tale to a linear development from the “traditional” tale (pure, straight, patriarchal, and didactic) to the “postmodern” tale (playful, sophisticated, feminist, and radical). Campbell joins other contemporary scholars in arguing that the fairy tale has always been a remarkably elastic form, allowing writers and storytellers of all types to reshape it according to their purposes.

The Brontës are most famous today for Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, haunting novels that clearly repurpose fairy tales and folklore. Campbell’s book, however, reveals similar repurposing throughout the entire Brontë oeuvre. The Brontës and the Fairy Tale is recursive: in demonstrating the ubiquity and multiplicity of uses of fairy tales in the works of the Brontës, Campbell enhances not only our understanding of the Brontës’ works but also the status of fairy tales in the Victorian period.

While teaching in Japan, Judith Pascoe was fascinated to discover the popularity that Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights has enjoyed there. Nearly 100 years after its first formal introduction to the country, the novel continues to engage the imaginations of Japanese novelists, filmmakers, manga artists and others, resulting in numerous translations, adaptations, and dramatizations. On the Bullet Train with Emily Brontë is Pascoe’s lively account of her quest to discover the reasons for the continuous Japanese embrace of Wuthering Heights, including quite varied and surprising adaptations of the novel. At the same time, the book chronicles Pascoe’s experience as an adult student of Japanese. She contemplates the multiple Japanese translations of Brontë, as contrasted to the single (or non-existent) English translations of major Japanese writers. Carrying out a close reading of a distant country’s Wuthering Heights, Pascoe begins to see American literary culture as a small island on which readers are isolated from foreign literature.
 
In this and in her previous book, The Sarah Siddons Audio Files, Pascoe’s engaging narrative innovates a new scholarly form involving immersive research practice to attempt a cross-cultural version of reader-response criticism. On the Bullet Train with Emily Brontë will appeal to scholars in the fields of 19th-century British literature, adaptation studies, and Japanese literary history.

In Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel—the first book-length study of the topic—Livia Arndal Woods traces the connections between literary treatments of pregnancy and the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth occurring over the long nineteenth century. Woods uses the problem of pregnancy in the Victorian novel (in which pregnancy is treated modestly as a rule and only rarely as an embodied experience) to advocate for “somatic reading,” a practice attuned to impressions of the body on the page and in our own messy lived experiences. Examining works by Emily Brontë, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and others, Woods considers instances of pregnancy that are tied to representations of immodesty, poverty, and medical diagnosis. These representations, Woods argues, should be understood in the arc of Anglo-American modernity and its aftershocks, connecting backward to early modern witch trials and forward to the criminalization of women for pregnancy outcomes in twenty-first-century America. Ultimately, she makes the case that by clearing space for the personal and anecdotal in scholarship, somatic reading helps us analyze with uncertainty rather than against it and allows for richer and more relevant textual interpretation.

 

Wuthering Heights at once fascinates and frustrates the reader with the highly charged, passionate and problematic relationships it portrays. This study provides a key to the text by examining the temporal and narrative rhythms through which Brontë presents the dualities by which we commonly define our selfhood: child and adult, female and male, symbiosis and separateness, illogic and common sense, classlessness and classboundedness, play and power, free will and determinism. The novel’s concern with unitary and fragmentary selves has romantic antecedents in DeQuincey and Shelley and in Charlotte Brontë’s figuration of Emily as a lost other self. This concern is, in turn, reflected in the “after-life” of the text in the work of later artists such as George Eliot, Lawrence, Buñuel, and Truffaut.