Charlotte Brontë, Autobiography, and the Image of the Hero
Abstract Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, was one of the many real-life heroes, probably the pre-eminent one, in Charlotte Brontë's life and works. He was a masculine type that attracted her, as both woman and writer, from a very early age; but she was not alone in her admiration of what Carlyle called 'the great ones of the earth'. The paper argues that Charlotte's response to historical characters like the Duke of Wellington is not only part of a cultural dynamic of hero-worship that provided a ready context for 'veneration' but is also part of the complex self-fashioning that we all experience in the process of identity formation. Wellington and his various mutations can be traced in her writing from the juvenilia to Shirley in particular, and can be seen as an evolving critique on the hero. They also reflect an important element of Charlotte Brontë's personal narrative and indicate the way hero-worship helped to mould her ambition, her love of politics and her idea of integrity.
Reimagining the Brontës : (post)feminist middlebrow adaptations and representations of feminine creative genius, 1996-2011
Investigating conceptualisations of the feminine creative imagination, this thesis examines representations of the Brontes and adaptations of their novels released between 1996 and 2011. I focus on portrayals of Charlotte and Anne Bronte alongside reworkings of Jane Eyre (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) in various media. Contributing to existing research on the cultural afterlives of the Brontes and their novels, I position the works discussed within contemporary middlebrow culture whilst considering the influence of feminism. 
 
The Introduction discusses the gendering of creative genius before identifying the tensions between critical, middlebrow and popular discourses’ conceptualisations of the Brontes’ imaginations. Thereafter, the first chapter proposes the contemporary usefulness and 
considers the gendering of the concept of the middlebrow. I demonstrate that middlebrow culture is fascinated by the Brontes’ lives, art and feminine creative imaginations. To further this argument, the second chapter analyses neo-Victorian novels’ engagement with Charlotte 
Bronte’s life, art and creativity. I illustrate that these works draw from second-wave feminist criticism on Jane Eyre and belong to a tradition of middlebrow feminine writing about the Brontes. The third chapter also examines representations of feminine creativity and discusses 
how screen adaptations portray the artistry of Jane Eyre’s heroine. Additionally, the legacies of second-wave feminism in a wider postfeminist cultural context are explored. In the fourth chapter, the thesis turns to analyse the cultural dissemination and reputations of Anne Bronte 
and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I delineate how middlebrow culture has rediscovered the youngest Bronte, her novel and her feminism. 
 
Ultimately, this thesis suggests that the works examined indicate middlebrow culture’s efforts to engage with feminism through the feminine creative imagination. Yet these works expose a prevailing tension in feminism between the status of the individual and the collective.
Evangelical Law Firms and the Translation of Arguments: A study of the Evangelical Movement s Influence through National and International Courts
................................................................................................VII Acknowledgements......................................................................................IX Abbreviations............................................................................................XI Central Legal Terms .................................................................................XII