ABSTRACT
In the focus on subjectivity, Emily Brontë may be seen to have much in common with her romantic forefathers, and certainly Wordsworthian and Byronic ideologies of the self are noticeable in her work. But Brontë also exhibits a post-romantic (and Victorian) preoccupation with the legacy of romanticism, where doubts about the self and its potentiality underpin poetic articulation. Burlinson's post-structuralist position enables her to celebrate a recognition of the fragmentation of subjectivity: the unitary self is a delusion. Historically situated between the political and aesthetic idealism of romanticism and the emergence and consolidation of Victorian cultural identity, Brontë's poetic texts are the site of a struggle in which self-representation is fraught with doubt and difficulty. Brontë's poetry has often been devalued beside the achievement of her novel, but this perspective appears fit for review. The poetry does, however, demand an aesthetics which can allow for fractures and fragmentations, uncertainties and contradictions.
