Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften Determining Wuthering Heights: Ideology, Intertexts, Tradition

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. Review " Determining Wuthering Heights: Ideology, Intertexts, Tradition places Emily Bronte's novel within an exceptionally broad literary context, exploring its links to a range of genres and traditions, English and non-English alike. Wuthering Heights, María Valero Redondo demonstrates with an impressive command of eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature, is not an anomaly it is sometimes thought to be, but rather a novel that participates in a network of complex intertextual connections."--Aleksandar Stevic, Assistant Professor of English, Lingnan University, Hong Kong "A paradigm case for formalist, structuralist, deconstructive, Marxist, historicist, psychoanalytic, feminist, and post-colonialist critics, Wuthering Heights, like the films of Alfred Hitchcock, the paintings of Picasso or the music of Beethoven, has long been in danger of disappearing beneath the sheer, accumulated weight of sophisticated theoretical commentary. Designated by F. R. Leavis as a 'kind of sport' for critics, the novel itself has receded into the background, made overly familiar as a result of its gratifying unfamiliarity. Now, in her pathbreaking study of this most over-read of novels, María Valero Redondo reveals what has been hiding all along in plain sight: Wuthering Heights is not the infinitely pliable text beloved of the theorists, nor, for that matter, is it an anomaly in the history of the novel, admired for its sui generis flouting of literary conventions and its punkish affronts to Victorian morality. Rather than re-tread this tired ground, Valero Redondo invites us to regard the novel as a carefully conceived response to a range of past, contemporary and future novels, novellas and poems: from Richardson's Pamela, /i> to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre; from Kleist's Der Findling to Matthew Lewis's The Monk; and from Byron's Manfred to Dickens's Great Expectations, the meaning of Wuthering Heights is located in a long history of intertextual participation, influence, and struggle. Bringing to the fore formal encounters and ideological confrontations that have not been sufficiently appreciated by critics, Determining Wuthering Heights: Ideology, Intertexts, Tradition makes a fresh and important contribution to Brontë studies and to the study of the novel."--Philip Shaw, Associate Professor of English Language and Old English, University of Leicester, United Kingdom"This book puts right the prevailing critical tradition that Wuthering Heights is an isolated anomaly