The writings of Charlotte Bronte - a member of one of the great literary families - have inspired, fascinated and moved readers ever since their first publication in the mid-nineteenth century. In this new study, Carl Plasa elaborates a series of textually focused, historically grounded and theoretically informed analyses of the full range of the author's texts. As well as providing original readings of Bronte's four best known novels - The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette - attention is given to less familiar and critically neglected areas of Bronte's work, such as the Ashanti narratives, the poetry and the Belgian essays of the early 1840s. Charlotte Bronte's work has undergone a significant reassessment from a postcolonial critical perspective in recent years. By examining Bronte's textual production from its exuberant and experimental beginnings to the formal complexity of Villette, her last completed novel, Plasa offers what is the most comprehensive exploration to date of the shifts in the writer's engagement with the question of colonialism. In so doing, he brings to light the subtle relationships of continuity and transformation between the earlier and later stages of Bronte's literary career and demonstrates the extent to which that career was sparked and driven by her 'colonial imagination'.

Examines a range of literary responses to images drawn from the transatlantic slave trade and its aftermath A focus on texts that (with the obvious exception of David Dabydeen's 'Turner' [1994]) exist at the critical and canonical margin An emphasis on Black Atlantic writers, designed to counter the bias in much ekphrastic criticism towards white authors Location of African American literature in conversation with African American as well as white American art Since around 2000, there has been a noticeable upsurge in critical work on the visual archive of Atlantic slavery, resulting in a host of important studies. While most of these contributions are weighted towards images created during the era of slavery itself, some critics have adopted a more historically far-reaching approach, exploring the ways in which such images live on beyond the original context of their production, circulation and consumption, returning imaginatively in different forms at different times and in different places. This book shares the fascination with the afterlives which such visual materials have enjoyed, but places the accent on how that posterity has evolved in the realms of literature, especially poetry. It focuses on transactions between texts written between the mid-1990s and 2020 and images of slavery that belong to British, American and (in one case) French traditions, as produced between c. 1779 and 1939.

With excerpts from interviews and reviews, an exploration of the historical documents and slave narrative traditions on which Morrison drew, and an insightful juxtaposition of psychoanalytic and postcolonial approaches to the novel, this guide places "Beloved" in the contexts of Morrison's oeuvre and other works of African American literature. Chapters focus on the supernatural elements of the work, as well as the author's treatment of the physical self.