![]() | Eros and Psyche (Routledge Revivals): The Representation of Personality in Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot Subjects: Language & Literature; Literature; Literary/ Critical Theory; Literature Readers & Sourcebooks; Women''s Literature; Literature by Geographic Area; Literature by Period; How does Victorian fiction represent personality? How does it express emotion and how does it imagine the mind? These questions stand at the centre of Eros and Psyche , first published in 1984. In examining how three authors - Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and George Eliot - depict the mind and organise emotion, Chase approaches their works as expressive structures, and analyses their struggle to accommodate rival imperatives in depicting personality: desire and duty, guilt and innocence, love and autonomy. The title begins with Brontë's early Angrian tales, which introduce the problem that unifies the book: the attempt of Victorian fiction to escape the constraints of the romance mode, while assimilating its energies. There follow readings of The Pickwick Papers , Jane Eyre , Bleak House , and Middlemarch , in the light of such problems as confinement and exposure in Brontë, tragic doubt in Dickens, and the image of the moral mind in George Eliot. Karen Chase |
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