Research Catalog

Charlotte Brontë and the storyteller's audience

Title: Charlotte Brontë and the storyteller's audience / by Carol Bock.
Author: Bock, Carol.
Publication: Iowa City : University of Iowa Press, ©1992.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Filter by

1 Item

Item details
Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Use in library	PR4169 .B63 1992	Off-site

Details

Description

188 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

This intelligent study offers a new and appreciative understanding of Charlotte Bronte as a narrative artist. With care and precision, Bock counters the prevailing view of Bronte's fiction as unconsciously confessional, clearly showing her persistent concern with the reader's collaborative role in the storytelling experience. Bock begins with an examination of the creative milieu at Haworth, where Bronte initially gained an understanding of her craft, and continues with a look at Bronte's relationship with her first audience, Branwell, Emily, and Anne, as well as the influence of her early readings in Scott, Byron, and Blackwood's Magazine. Bronte's juvenile tales are used to describe the model of storytelling that she conceptualized during these formative years - a model which reflects her belief that author and reader meet on the border of actuality and imagination in order to pursue the truths that narrative fiction can contain. Individual chapters discuss the motif of reading and storytelling in The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette and consider the narrative methods which characterize Bronte's relationship with her readers in each of these novels. Bock traces Bronte's development as a storyteller from an early struggle to reconceptualize her audience as she tried to enter the literary marketplace with The Professor to, in her final novel, Villette, a complex acknowledgment of the ways truth may be encompassed - contained, named, and observed - in fictional narrative and a hopeful account of the creative event in which readers and writers participate. Charlotte Bronte and the Storyteller's Audience also includes a history of the critical reception of Bronte's novels, pointing out some of the interpretive constraints by which the practice of reading her fiction as unconscious confession has limited our understanding of her narrative skill and literary concerns.

Subject

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (p. [177]-183) and index.

Contents

1. Storytelling at Haworth -- 2. The Professor's Audience: The Private Circle and "The Public at Large" -- 3. The Political Arts of Reading and Storytelling in Jane Eyre -- 4. Storytelling and the Multiple Audiences of Shirley -- 5. Encompassing the Truth: Lucy Snowe as Interpretant.

ISBN

0877453632
9780877453635

LCCN

92013446

OCLC

ocm25708312
25708312
SCSB-14140348

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library