Miss Havisham’s dress: Materialising Dickens in film adaptations of Great Expectations

This article was published in Neo-Victorian Studies© 2012.This essay focuses on the neo-Victorian materialisation of Dickens’s vision through the costuming of the Miss Havisham figure in three film adaptations of Great Expectations: David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), and Alfonso Cuarón’s Great Expectations (1998), a modern updating. The distinct film language which emerges from the costume designs in each of these films enables cinema audiences to re-read and re-imagine the novel’s portrayal of perverse and uncanny femininity. As a result, the disturbing and enduring ambiguity of Havisham’s clothing establishes her as a figure of resistance to modernity, and as an embodiment of decline, signalling youth and age by means of a robe which is at once wedding gown, unfashionable garment and shroud

Competing Life Narratives: Portraits of Vita Sackville-West

This article sets out to examine the fraught, often contested relationship between multiple and competing life narratives, taking as its focus the case of Vita Sackville-West and her infamous love affair with Violet Trefusis. Vita wrote her account of this relationship in a short, autobiographical fragment (1920–21), and this text now forms the basis of nearly all subsequent accounts of her life. By examining how Vita's confession has been appropriated and revised by successive generations of the Nicolson family—in Nigel Nicolson's biography of his parents, Portrait of a Marriage (1973) and Adam Nicolson's recent television documentary, Sissinghurst (2009)—this article will identify the relational structures that exist between texts and across different life-writing genres and media. Contemporary studies of life writing and relationality have emphasised the intratextual connections between subjects. By contrast, the example of Vita Sackville-West highlights the importance of intertextuality. This article explores how intertextual relations—the construction of lives in response to extant accounts; the repetition, revision and accumulation of life narratives—has served to sustain an open-ended industry of life writing

Late style and speaking out: J A Symonds's In the Key of Blue

This article examines In the Key of Blue (1893)—an essay collection by John Addington Symonds—as a case study in queer public utterance during the early 1890s. Viewed through the critical lens of late style, as theorised by Edward Said, the evolution of this project, from compilation through to reader reception, reveals Symonds's determination to “speak out” on the subject of homosexuality. Paradoxically, In the Key of Blue was thus a timely and untimely work: it belonged to a brief period of increased visibility and expressiveness when dealing with male same-sex desire, spearheaded by a younger generation of Decadent writers, but it also cut against the grain of nineteenth-century social taboo and legal repression. Symonds's essay collection brought together new and previously unpublished work with examples of his writing for the periodical press. These new combinations, appearing together for the first time, served to facilitate new readings and new inferences, bringing homosexual themes to the fore. This article traces the dialogic structure of In the Key of Blue , its strategies for articulating homosexual desire, and examines the response of reviewers, from the hostile to celebratory

Introduction: Picturing Charlotte Brontë

The chapter introduces the edited volume of essays and engages with how Charlotte Brontë's image in the twenty-first century

Introduction to the Edinburgh Companion to the Brontes and the Arts

This chapter introduces the wider historical and cultural contexts of the Brontë family’s engagement with the arts, which include painting, drawing sculpture, music, literature, theatre, architecture, design and crafts. It demonstrates how this engagement permeated their creative work, leading to the development of an aesthetic sensibility which today is identified as recognisably ‘Brontëan’, an approach which privileges imaginative exploration and a heightened engagement with the workings of the interior life. The chapter demonstrates how the aesthetic discourses of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries informed the Brontës’ understanding of their cultural moment, helping to shape their development as writers and artists, focusing on Branwell’s portrait of his sisters in the National Portrait Gallery, London. The chapter also offers critical assessments of the influence of the arts on the family’s creative work, as well as the important role played by art in the heritage and tourism industries associated with the Brontës’ lives and legacies. This chapter highlights the book’s unique contribution to existing scholarship in Brontë studies. The Introduction also presents an overview of subsequent chapters, demonstrating how each contributor’s discussion relates to the book’s overall rationale and design.Unfunde

Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and Afterlives

Complete Edited Book. The edited collection was reviewed in Victorian Studies and here is a quotation from Janet Gezari: 'The book begins with a scrupulous and detailed account of actual and conjectural pictures of Brontë . I cannot think of another artist whose appearance has received so much attention. What is the difference between the continuing life of works of art and the continuing life of an artist? What difference does it make to that continuing life when the artist is a woman? . Most of the essays in part 1 focus on the "afterlife" part of this collection, and are thoughtful, scholarly, and consistently attentive to what it now means to study a Victorian cult writer in relation to the history of her reception and to contemporary concerns.' Janet Gezari, Connecticut College, Victorian Studies, Volume 61, Number 1, Autumn 2018This edited collection offers a timely reflection on Charlotte Brontë's life and work in the context of the bicentenary of her birth in 2016. Brontë's legacy continues to evolve and the new essays in this volume, covering the period from her first publication to the present day, explain why she has remained at the forefront of global literary cultures. Taking a fresh look at over 150 years of engagement with one of the best-loved novelists of the Victorian period, the volume examines areas such as genre, narrative style, national and regional identities, sexuality, literary tourism, adaptation theories, cultural studies, postcolonial and transnational readings. The contributors to this volume offer innovative interpretations of the rich variety of afterlives enjoyed by characters such as Jane Eyre and Rochester in neo-Victorian fiction, cinema and television, on the stage and on the web. Bringing the story of Charlotte's legacy up to date, the essays analyse obituaries, vlogs, stage and screen adaptations, fan fiction and erotic makeovers, showing that Charlotte Brontë's influence has been manifold and an enduring feature of the feminist movement

Chromosome Xq23 is associated with lower atherogenic lipid concentrations and favorable cardiometabolic indices

Abstract Autosomal genetic analyses of blood lipids have yielded key insights for coronary heart disease (CHD). However, X chromosome genetic variation is understudied for blood lipids in large sample sizes. We now analyze genetic and blood lipid data in a high-coverage whole X chromosome sequencing study of 65,322 multi-ancestry participants and perform replication among 456,893 European participants. Common alleles on chromosome Xq23 are strongly associated with reduced total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, and triglycerides (min P = 8.5 × 10−72), with similar effects for males and females. Chromosome Xq23 lipid-lowering alleles are associated with reduced odds for CHD among 42,545 cases and 591,247 controls (P = 1.7 × 10−4), and reduced odds for diabetes mellitus type 2 among 54,095 cases and 573,885 controls (P = 1.4 × 10−5). Although we observe an association with increased BMI, waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for BMI is reduced, bioimpedance analyses indicate increased gluteofemoral fat, and abdominal MRI analyses indicate reduced visceral adiposity. Co-localization analyses strongly correlate increased CHRDL1 gene expression, particularly in adipose tissue, with reduced concentrations of blood lipids

New insights into the genetic etiology of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias

Characterization of the genetic landscape of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related dementias (ADD) provides a unique opportunity for a better understanding of the associated pathophysiological processes. We performed a two-stage genome-wide association study totaling 111,326 clinically diagnosed/‘proxy’ AD cases and 677,663 controls. We found 75 risk loci, of which 42 were new at the time of analysis. Pathway enrichment analyses confirmed the involvement of amyloid/tau pathways and highlighted microglia implication. Gene prioritization in the new loci identified 31 genes that were suggestive of new genetically associated processes, including the tumor necrosis factor alpha pathway through the linear ubiquitin chain assembly complex. We also built a new genetic risk score associated with the risk of future AD/dementia or progression from mild cognitive impairment to AD/dementia. The improvement in prediction led to a 1.6- to 1.9-fold increase in AD risk from the lowest to the highest decile, in addition to effects of age and the APOE ε4 allele