A paper-knife and an English novel: slitting wuthering heights. Afterword

Abstract

Twenty-first century scholarship on the Brontës and Wuthering Heights pays renewed attention to social, historical and cultural factors that had been overlooked by earlier critics, leading to a variety of perspectives and ongoing debates surrounding the novel and its author. However, despite these sociological and interdisciplinary approaches, the novel is still considered a hermeneutic singularity in the history of English literature. María Valero’s approach, in contrast, focuses on the literary and ideological factors in Wuthering Heights by considering the literary context of the time period. Detaching herself from new formalist approaches such as surface reading and all its variants, which tend to imply an immediate approach to the literary text, Valero Redondo vindicates the importance and efficacy of symptomatic reading to shed light on the novel’s formal, thematic and ideological structure, contributing to the lively scholarly debates about interpretation and post-critique. The monograph is comprised of seven chapters, excluding the introduction. Within each chapter, Valero Redondo establishes a direct connection between Wuthering Heights and other literary texts that have a substantial impact on the novel’s ideology. The author takes care to emphasize that these selected texts are not haphazardly chosen, but rather influential works that gained prominence in the literary world during the early 1800s, following the decline of the rigidly defined Augustan literary field.