Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture Series by Sally Shuttleworth, Jill L. Matus

This ground-breaking study successfully challenges the traditional tendency to regard Charlotte Brontë as having existed in a historical vacuum. Using texts ranging from local newspapers to medical tomes belonging to the Brontës, Sally Shuttleworth explores Victorian constructions of psychology, sexuality and insanity, and traces the ways in which Charlotte Brontë's texts operate in relation to this complex framework... moreThis ground-breaking study successfully challenges the traditional tendency to regard Charlotte Brontë as having existed in a historical vacuum. Using texts ranging from local newspapers to medical tomes belonging to the Brontës, Sally Shuttleworth explores Victorian constructions of psychology, sexuality and insanity, and traces the ways in which Charlotte Brontë's texts operate in relation to this complex framework. Shuttleworth offers a reading of Brontë's fiction informed by a new understanding of the psychological debates of her time. less

Jill Matus explores shock in Victorian fiction and psychology with startling results that reconfigure the history of trauma theory. Central to Victorian thinking about consciousness and emotion, shock is a concept that challenged earlier ideas about the relationship between mind and body... moreJill Matus explores shock in Victorian fiction and psychology with startling results that reconfigure the history of trauma theory. Central to Victorian thinking about consciousness and emotion, shock is a concept that challenged earlier ideas about the relationship between mind and body. Although the new materialist psychology of the mid-nineteenth century made possible the very concept of a wound to the psyche - the recognition, for example, that those who escaped physically unscathed from train crashes or other overwhelming experiences might still have been injured in some significant way - it was Victorian fiction, with its complex explorations of the inner life of the individual and accounts of upheavals in personal identity, that most fully articulated the idea of the haunted, possessed and traumatized subject. This wide-ranging book reshapes our understanding of Victorian theories of mind and memory and reveals the relevance of nineteenth-century culture to contemporary theories of trauma. less