Abstract: This article considers how present-day popular psychology practices of positive self-talk offer a helpful model for interpreting Emma and Jane Austen's narrative perspective. This context opens up the possibility that rather than conveying the emotions and thoughts that spontaneously arise in the heroine's mind, the narrative instead transmits the reflections the heroine constructs for the purpose of keeping herself in good spirits. In curating positive reflections, Emma applies to herself a caregiving technique described by eighteenth-century novels and conduct books, which recommended that young women converse in a sprightly manner for the purpose of comforting their older family members. Reading Emma in this way orients our understanding of the novel's didacticism away from the chastising Knightley and toward the caregiving heroine.
This essay explores how debilitated appetites in Wuthering Heights spread among the novel's characters as diseases. While critics comment on the ways Heathcliff's hunger engenders Catherine's anorectic refusals, Hindley's alcoholism and Frances's tubercular consumption also respond to Heathcliff's arrival at Wuthering Heights, exposing more complex entanglements of physical illness, emotional suffering, and traumatic experience. By situating these appetites in relation to nineteenth-century medical ideas about Anorexia nervosa, inebriety, tuberculosis, and miasma theories of disease, the disabling effects of racial persecution (Heathcliff), gendered confinement (Catherine and Frances), and social dispossession (Hindley) disclose biopolitical distributions of risk along the lines of race, gender, class, and disability that underwrote British racial capitalism, structuring both appetite and embodiment in the provincial scene of the everyday.
Typically compared to other modernist autobiographies, George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin has a more unlikely resemblance to a book with which it ostensibly shares very little: Charles Dickens's Bleak House. Lamming uses Dickens's dual narrators-the first-person autobiographical voice and the third-person omniscient perspective-and weaves them together through the personal development of his protagonist, G, as he ages and watches his village change. Lamming uses the form of the autobiographical novel and Dickens's narrators to create a panoramic view of an entire village. He then juxtaposes those two narrators with the dominant narratives of the empire, represented locally by the landlord and broadly by selectively edited versions of history that are taught to the Barbadians in school, and creates the narrative space for resistance to colonial narratives through the form of narration pioneered by Dickens a century prior.
