This new essay collection brings together some of the top BrontA" scholars working today, as well as new critical voices, to examine the many layers of Anne BrontA"'s fiction and other writings and to restore BrontA" to her rightful place in literary history. Until very recently, BrontA"'s literary fate has been to live in the critical shadow of her older sisters, Charlotte and Emily, in spite of the fact that her two published novels, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall were widely read and discussed during her lifetime. From a variety of fields-including psychology, religion, social criticism and literary tradition-the contributors to New Approaches to the Literary Art of Anne BrontA" re-assess her works as those of an artist, which demand the rigorous scholarship and attention that they receive here.

Barbara Suess explores the ways in which Yeats's plays offer an alternative form of progress via a philosophical system of opposites; always seeking the opposite, the nature of which changes as we change, we continually augment our personalities, and ultimately improve society, with the inclusion of the Other.

Progress and Identity in the Poems of W. B. Yeats explores the ways in which Yeats's plays offer an alternative form of progress via a philosophical system of opposites: always seeking the opposite, the nature of which changes as we change, we continually augment our personalities, and ultimately improve society, with the inclusion of the Other. This system, which eventually became Yeats's doctrine of the mask, provided his contemporaries with a method of changing what science, Platonism, and Victorian bourgeois ideologies claimed to be inescapable qualities of self. Progress and Identity relocates Yeats's literary, social, and political relevance from his essentializing cultural nationalism to his later, more broad-minded definitions of progress.

This new essay collection brings together some of the top BrontA" scholars working today, as well as new critical voices, to examine the many layers of Anne BrontA"'s fiction and other writings and to restore BrontA" to her rightful place in literary history. Until very recently, BrontA"'s literary fate has been to live in the critical shadow of her older sisters, Charlotte and Emily, in spite of the fact that her two published novels, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall were widely read and discussed during her lifetime. From a variety of fields-including psychology, religion, social criticism and literary tradition-the contributors to New Approaches to the Literary Art of Anne BrontA" re-assess her works as those of an artist, which demand the rigorous scholarship and attention that they receive here.

Concerned for her family’s financial welfare and eager to expand her own horizons, Agnes Grey takes up the position of governess, the only respectable employment for an unmarried woman in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, Agnes cannot anticipate the hardship, humiliation, and loneliness that await her in the brutish Bloomfield and haughty Murray households. Drawn from Anne Brontë’s own experiences, Agnes Grey depicts the harsh conditions and class snobbery that governesses were often forced to endure. As Barbara A. Suess writes in her Introduction, “Brontë provides a portrait of the governess that is as sympathetic as her fictional indictment of the shallow, selfish moneyed class is biting.”