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>