According to the Introduction, "Lucy Sheerman examines the dark and snarled legacy of Charlotte Brontë's most famous work for genre romance."
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I want to look in more detail at the influence of Jane Eyre on contemporary romance and to consider, in particular, the way in which its singular narrative voice and the travails of its narrator serve to eclipse other stories and voices. (101)
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In spite of a huge shift in the way in which it is analyzed and discussed with the introduction of class, race and colonial critiques, Jane Eyre has continued to be regarded as a romance; in fact, following Kaplan, in many ways it is a mnemic romance, so far-reaching that it is hard to imagine contemporary romance without its influence - the complex hero-villain, the gothic house, the false hero, the interrupted wedding, the fierce love rival, the friendless central protagonist, the fiery narrator navigating a hostile universe, and of course the search for and belief in the healing power of love in spite of apparently impossible obstacles. It is therefore possible to read contemporary romance novels arguing with and responding to its influence without directly referencing the novel at all. (104)
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In this final section I want to examine two contemporary neo-Victorian novels and mass-market romances, which [...] focus directly on the experience of slavery and reexamine the way in which it is represented and voiced. Beverly Jenkins' novel Forbidden (2016) and Alyssa Cole's An Extraordinary Union (2017) both figure characters who have been enslaved, and both are also romances. (112)
According to the Introduction, "Lucy Sheerman examines the dark and snarled legacy of Charlotte Brontë's most famous work for genre romance."
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