What to Read When You Want to Celebrate Feminism
We here at The Rumpus matriarchy are celebrating all of our feminist “mothers” this Mother’s Day!
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Posts Tagged: Jane Eyre
Saying What Shouldn’t Be Said: A Conversation with Julie Buntin
Julie Buntin discusses her debut novel, Marlena, why writing about teenage girls is the most serious thing in the world, and finding truths in fiction.
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #17: Oppression, Ownership, Turkeys, and Roses
Politics has become a bloated balloon on the horizon of our days, marked with the face of the Pr*sident, grinning under his orange corona like a demented sun-god, a raucous Ra. It burns.
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Wishing and Hoping: Card Tricks, Love Spells, and Methods of Escape
I’ll go one further and posit that we need our illusionists: to disprove our eyes, investigate our dreams, and sometimes charm the money from our pockets.
...moreDaddy Wasn’t There
Anyone who made it through high school English can probably recall reading a story or two about young protagonists finding themselves in the absence of parental guidance. From whence does this orphan trope come? And why? Is this what all of us innately fear—the state of being in charge of our destinies, the only ones […]
...moreFingerprints On Every Sentence
For Electric Literature, Selin Gökcesu shares her experience rereading Jane Eyre. Though she had loved the novel in childhood, Gökcesu’s MFA experience and her “selective” adult perspective “eroded” her interest in the novel: At thirty-eight, what I perceived as Brontë’s moral standpoint rubbed me the wrong way. Nowadays, to enjoy a book, not only do […]
...moreBurning the House Down
In the wake of Jane Eyre’s 200th birthday and Claire Vaye Watkins’s essay “On Pandering,” Bridget Read looks at the proto-feminism in Jane Eyre as eventually improved upon in the postcolonial update Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (now celebrating its 50th birthday).
...moreThe Heroine’s Journey
What do Jane Eyre, Catherine Linton, and Katniss Everdeen have in common? “They can’t be pinned down. They are dazzlingly complex,” says Samantha Ellis, author of How to Be a Heroine, over at the BBC. Great heroines are fiercely passionate, Ellis writes. “And maybe that is really why these heroines last, because they make our own […]
...moreSelfies from Jane Eyre
The refusal of such a woman, who lived in such a time, to be silent created a new mold for the self… Karen Swallow Prior, writing for the Atlantic, shares her essay on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and its roots in the Protestant Reformation that contributed to the Western idea of the self—and so, inevitably, […]
...moreBetween the Pages
Long since buried and canonized, Charlotte Brontë is now subject to every writer’s worst nightmare. A poem and prose piece penned by a teenaged Brontë have recently been discovered between the pages of a book that belonged to the Victorian author’s mother. The Brontë Society will acquire the previously unpublished works within the next few […]
...moreOrphans in Literature
At The New Inquiry, Alison Kinney examines the use of orphanhood in literature and what attracts readers to this narrative. She goes on to discuss the similarities and differences between orphans represented in literature, like Jane Eyre, and orphans in our real world: Fairy tales of stolen infants resonate with those of us who come from […]
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Rewrite, Reboot, Remix
Rewriting the classics has become a stale and risk-averse strategy. But that shouldn’t spoil the fun of our larger culture of remixing.
...moreFanfiction in the Classroom
At The Millions, Elizabeth Minkel shares her take on fanfiction and its place within the classroom.
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