Introduction: human subjects: reimagining the Brontës for twenty-first-century scholarship Alexandra Lewis; 1. Hanging, crushing, and shooting: animals, violence and child-rearing in Brontë fiction Sally Shuttleworth; 2. Learning to imagine Dinah Birch; 3. Charlotte Brontë and the science of the imagination Janis McLarren Caldwell; 4. Being human: de-gendering mental anxiety; or hysteria, hypochondriasis, and traumatic memory in Charlotte Brontë's Villette Alexandra Lewis; 5. Charlotte Brontë and the listening reader Helen Groth; 6. Burning art and political resistance: Anne Brontë's radical imaginary of wives, slaves, and animals in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Deborah Denenholz Morse; 7. Degraded nature: Wuthering Heights and the last poems of Emily Brontë Helen Small; 8. 'Angels ... recognize our innocence': on theology and 'human rights' in the fiction of the Brontës Jan-Melissa Schramm; 9. 'A strange change approaching': ontology, reconciliation, and eschatology in Wuthering Heights Simon Marsden; 10. 'Surely some oracle has been with me': women's prophecy and ethical rebuke in poems by Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë Rebecca Styler; 11. Jane Eyre, a teaching experiment Isobel Armstrong; 12. Fiction as critique: postcripts to Jane Eyre and Villette Barbara Hardy; 13. We are three sisters: the lives of the Brontës as a Chekhovian play Blake Morrison.