Misreading Jane Eyre

This Revisionary Look At Charlotte Brontë's Classic Novel Jane Eyre Offers ARigorous New Reading And An Interrogation Of The Reading ProcessExamining Both Literary Historical Contexts And Contexts Produced Within The Structure Of The Narrative Itself and Incorporating ANumber Of Literary Critical Strands, Including Historical Scholarship, Reception Aesthetics, Iserian Phenomenology, Bakhtinian Dialogism, And Traditional Formalism, Beaty Resituates The Common Feminist Reading Of Jane EyreIn The First Section, 'intertextualities,' Beaty Displays AProficient Knowledge Of The Intertextual Relationships Between Jane Eyre And Numerous, Often Obscure, Works From The Late Eighteenth And Early Nineteenth CenturiesWhile Tracing The Sequence Of The Narrative, He Contextualizes The Novel, Showing How Brontë's Work Contains Motifs And Scenes Similar To Such Contemporary Narratives As Female Rebellion Tales, Orphan Tales, Governess Tales, Vampire Tales, And Love Stories'strategies Of The Text,' The Second Section, Considers Contexts Created Within The NovelBeaty Looks At The Dialogic Display Between The Young, Maturing, And The Mature Jane, The NarratorIn Addition He Examines The Ways Various Scenes Recall Each Other, 'spatializing' The NarrativeThis Leads To The Larger Question Of How The Narrative's Configuration As AWhole Affects Readings And Leads To Beaty's Own misreadingsBeaty Argues That While All Of The Elements He Brings Together Are Imperative, They Prove To Be Incompatible, Can Never Claim To Be Definitive, And Will Inevitably End In AMisreadingWhile Some Of His Interpretations Run Counter To Current Orthodoxies, His Arguments Are Always Intelligent And Illuminating, And He Writes With Clarity And DirectnessMisreading 'jane Eyre' Offers ARich And Useful Paradigm, And AProvocative Revisionary Reading That Furthers Our Understanding Of Jane Eyre And Of Reading And Narrative PracticesJerome Beaty Is Professor Of English At Emory University, Atlanta, GeorgiaHe Is The Author Of 'middlemarch' From Notebook To Novel, The Coauthor Of Poetry From Statement To Meaning, The Editor Of The Norton Introduction To The Short Novel And The Norton Introduction To Fiction, And The Coeditor Of The Norton Introduction To Literature.
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