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The Brontes & Critical Close Reading

The Other Victorians

Summary Evidence Stakes Close Reading

Critical Close Reading Assignment

“The process of emergence, in such conditions, is then a constantly repeated, an always renewable, move beyond a phase of practical incorporation: usually made difficult by the fact that much incorporation looks like recognition, acknowledgement, and thus a form of acceptance. (RW, “D,R,E”, p. 124-5)

Test case 1

“The resources of the previously oppressed … are not lost or wiped out through the structures of oppression that helped to define them: they are preserved somewhere, in the past itself, with effects and traces that can be animated in a number of different contexts and terms in the present.” EG, The Nick of Time, 257

Test Case 2

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Size of a credit card19 pages longStory of murder & insanity“Young Men’s Magazine No 2.”(Charlotte hand-copied the contents of periodicals onto hand-cut pages)

Map of Glass Town, Angria, by Branwell Bronte, 1831

“Glass Town and Angrian Saga” (Charlotte, Branwell) Reconstructible, available in Oxford

World’s Classics

Gondal Saga Emily, Anne Unreconstructible, only poetic fragments

Sagas / Fictional Worlds

“One day, in Autumn of 1845, I accidentally lighted on an MS volume of verse in my sister Emily’s handwriting. Of course, I was not surprised, knowing that she could and did write verse: I looked it over, and something more than surprise seized me – a deep conviction that these were not common effusions, nor at all like the poetry women generally write. I thought them condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine. To my ear they also had a peculiar music – wild, melancholy, and elevating.”

“Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell,” in Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, 1850.

Charlotte Bronte: