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Letters to Jane
Bhalla, Divya Radhika
Bhalla, Divya Radhika
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Abstract
Letters to Jane is an epistolary novella that explores what postcolonialist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak terms as the “tangent narrative” that concludes the Victorian novel Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë. Letters to Jane employs interdisciplinary methodologies to retell Jane Eyre. The novella functions as a postcolonial counter discourse that examines the complicity of missionaries in the colonial project through letters written by St. John Rivers to Jane Eyre from Calcutta between 1809-1819. Additionally, by employing new historicist theories that regard history as co-text rather than context and by constructing a Marxist history from below, Letters to Jane contributes to the feminist recovery of lost voices by emphasizing the stories of working-class Indian women. It also reflects a postmodern complication of the Victorian epistolary form through its self-reflexive commentary on a project where the empire writes back through the very structure of the narrative itself as letters that travel from India to England.This dissertation thus makes a significant intervention in retellings of Jane Eyre by being the first novella in English by an Indian writer to “re-right” the original from an interdisciplinary perspective while engaging in the act of self-representation. Such retellings are important to respond to the call of Ronjaunee Chatterjee and her colleagues not only to “undiscipline” Victorian Studies but contribute towards “a larger anti-racist project” by engaging this white, insular, Eurocentric field with scholars of color from other disciplines, thereby translating scholarship to activism.
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2023-01-01
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University of Kansas
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This item contains archived web content.
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Keywords
Creative writing, creative writing, Jane Eyre, novella