María Valero Redondo

Gebundenes Buch

Determining Wuthering Heights

Ideology, Intertexts, Tradition

Beschreibung

Recent criticism on Emily Brontë and her novel has tried to correct the deep-rooted belief that Emily Brontë was a literary "genius" isolated in the moors of Haworth. Indeed, an overview of recent Brontë scholarship indicates that two important critical shifts have lately cropped up: an increasing sociological attention to cultural studies on the one hand and an emphasis on interdisciplinarity. The present book is an unprecedented and groundbreaking study on Wuthering Heights. It detaches itself from the current productive vogue for sociological approaches to narrative texts which has contributed to obscure the focus on anomalous intertextual relations, and prioritizes the literary context over any other biographical, historical, or cultural context. Determining Wuthering Heights postulates a determinate intertextual meaning of Emily Brontë's novel, enriching its heterogeneity by examining its dialogic relation with previous, contemporary and subsequent texts in order to confirm that Emily Brontë's novel is not sui generis.

The target audience of the book would be members of the academic community interested in Victorian literature in general (researchers, scholars...) and in Wuthering Heights in particular. However, since Wuthering Heights has become a classic novel which is today read and discussed in universities around the world, the subject may also appeal to students who have to take a course on Victorian Literature and/or on the Brontës.

Autor

Dr. María Valero Redondo holds a European Doctorate obtained at the University of Córdoba, Spain. She is Lecturer at the Department of English and German Philology, University of Córdoba. She has been a Visiting Student at the University of Cambridge and the University of Kent. Her main research interest is nineteenth-century English literature.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Peter Lang
• Artikelnr. des Verlages: 317747
• 1. Auflage
• Seitenzahl: 380
• Erscheinungstermin: 14. April 2021
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 231mm x 155mm x 25mm
• Gewicht: 606g
• ISBN-13: 9781433177477
• ISBN-10: 1433177471
• Artikelnr.: 60852389

Rezensionen

"This book puts right the prevailing critical tradition that Wuthering Heights is an isolated anomaly in the evolution of the English Victorian novel. By means of a set of detailed analyses of relevant eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century works in relation to Wuthering Heights, the author convincingly proves its full integration in the literary context of the period. Her attempt provides moreover a new lease of life for intertextuality studies, which had languished for at least two decades now under the pressure of critical movements more concerned with the 'absolute' meaning yielded by this work when looked at from different angles (biographical, historical, Marxist, feminist, post-colonial, etc.) than with its links

across a dense meaning-making network of intertextual relations. In order to argue her point, María Valero Redondo places Wuthering Heights in conversation with texts ranging from Richardson's Pamela (1740) to Dickens's Great Expectations (1861), including predictable narratives such as Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) and Shirley (1849), but also mildly startling ones such as Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), Byron's poem Manfred (1817), and Heinrich von Kleist's Novellen, especially Der Findling. I am happy to endorse the publication of this book for a number of reasons. First, for the originality and novelty of its attempt. Valero Redondo's critical method is much more than a mere philological hunt for sources and echoes; it comes closer, in my view, to Eliot's systematic, synchronic conception of literary tradition as the sum total of combined efforts that shape the ever-spiralling trajectory of verbal art. Second, for the impressive breadth of the textual material she brings to bear on her intertextual study of Wuthering Heights. This gives her critical conclusions a strong air of assurance and dependability. And third, for her successful effort to reinstate intertextual studies in the current critical mainstream. I have no doubt that this book will fully satisfy scholars and specialists in the nineteenth-century English novel, literary theorists in search of new, or newly updated, critical methods, and less specialized readers willing to know if Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights actually constitutes the irreducible singularity we have been led to believe by standard criticism."-José A. Álvarez-Amorós, Professor of English Literature and Criticism, Universidad de Alicante, Spain