Eros and Psyche Routledge Revivals

<P>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 <I>Eros and Psyche</I>, 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. </P><P>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 <I>The Pickwick Papers</I>, <I>Jane Eyre</I>, <I>Bleak House</I>, and <I>Middlemarch</I>, 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. </P>