Determining Wuthering Heights

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.

Acknowledgements – Introduction – An Overview of Wuthering Heights’ Critical Reception: Problems and Omissions – Wuthering Heights: "The Housekeeper’s Tale" – Wuthering Heights and Kleist’s Novellen: Rousseauian Nature, Implosive Communities and the Performative Subversion of the Law – Wuthering Heights: A Gothic Novel – Wuthering Heights: An Epic Poem – Wuthering Heights: A Social Novel – Wuthering Heights: A Bildungsroman – Conclusions – Afterword by Julián Jiménez Heffernan – Index.

“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