Heta Pyrhönen

'Bluebeard,' the tale of a sadistic husband who murders his wives and locks away their bodies, has inspired hundreds of adaptations since it first appeared in 1697. In Bluebeard Gothic, Heta Pyrhönen argues that Charlotte Brontë's 1847 classic Jane Eyre can be seen as one such adaptation, and that although critics have been slow to realize the connection, authors rewriting Brontë's novel have either intuitively or intentionally seized on it. Pyrhönen begins by establishing that the story of Jane Eyre is intermingled with the 'Bluebeard' tale, as young Jane moves between households, each dominated by its own Bluebeard figure. She then considers rewritings of Jane Eyre, such as Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale (2006), to examine how novelists have interpreted the status and meaning of 'Bluebeard' in Brontë's novel. Using psychoanalysis as the primary model of textual analysis, Bluebeard Gothic focuses on the conjunction of religion, sacrifice, and scapegoating to provide an original interpretation of a canonical and frequently-studied text.

Jane Eyre and its Progeny

Bluebeard Gothic

Sanna Nyqvist

Päivi Koivisto

Tutkijat ovat saaneet luettavakseen Keltaisen kirjaston parhaita teoksia. Tarkan lukijan käsissä tutut ja tulevat klassikot taipuvat yllättäviin asentoihin.

Keltainen kirjasto tutkijoiden silmin

Keltaiset esseet

Both detective and reader attempt to solve the crimes in detective novels, relying on the same motifs but employing different narrative interpretations to do so. A unique and lucid examination of a complex genre.

Narrative and Moral Problems in the Detective Story

Mayhem and Murder

Janna Kantola

New technologies are changing our reading habits. Laptops, e-readers, tablets and other handheld devices supply new platforms for reading, and we must learn to manage them by scrolling, clicking or tapping. Reading Today places reading in current literary and cultural contexts in order to analyse how these contexts challenge our conceptions of who reads, what reading is, how we read, where we read, and for what purposes – and then responds to the questions this analysis raises. Is our reading experience becoming a ‘flat’ one? And does reading in a media environment favour quick reading? Alongside these questions, the contributors unpack emerging strategies of reading.They consider, for example, how paying attention to readers’ emotional reactions as an indispensable component of reading affects our conception of the reading process. Other chapters consider how reading can be explored through such topics as experimental literature, the contemporary encyclopedic novel and the healing power of books.

Heta Pyrhönen

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