Abstract

Despite the resurgence of critical interest in categories of place in literature, especially relating to debates about regionalism and cosmopolitanism, the term “provincial” remains relatively uninterrogated. In this essay I explore the term as it is evoked in recent critical writings, but also as it was used in the mid-nineteenth-century context, specifically in relation to Charlotte Brontë and her last novel, Villette (1853). In the nineteenth century, “provincial” was a term that derived less from topography than from print, and it encompassed a particular form of modernity. A fuller understanding of the category helps to explain its persistence within literary history and its specific significance within the imagined geographies of Brontë’s work.

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