Literature's finest schlock?

Wuthering Heights is really multifunctional. Not even the Uganda political situation escapes it:

The eldest of the Byanyima children and generally the most perceptive in that family, Edith Byanyima knew the terrible future waiting for Ugandans that most of us are only starting to realise today.
In Emily Bronte’s Gothic novel Wuthering Heights publish in 1847, the English writer narrates the story of a family in the moors of Yorkshire called Earnshaw.
“Its hero, Heathcliff, a waif from the streets of London, is adopted and given a home in Wuthering Heights. Thinking himself rejected, Heathcliff as an adult systematically seeks revenge, even against those who love him dearly.” (Grolier Universal Encyclopedia, 1965 edition, Vol. 10, page 607)
See how strikingly the Earnshaw family reminds you of the landed and propertied family called Byanyima in Uganda in the 1950s and their relationship with Museveni.
Heathcliff has no friends. He trusts nobody. You can’t be loyal enough to him to get him to like or trust you. He lives in his own world.
A perennial weakness among the Mengo establishment is that of always wishing to appear dignified, calm, and reasonable. “Mubere bakakamu” is the catch phrase heard in every setting of official Buganda, calling for dignity in the face of provocation. (Timothy Kalyegira in The Uganda Daily Monitor)

Slate reviews Brideshead Revisited 2008 and slips this rather controversial reference:

"Waugh wrote Brideshead with great speed, unfamiliar excitement, and a deep conviction of its excellence," Martin Amis once remarked. "Lasting schlock, the really good bad book, cannot be written otherwise."
All apologies to Wuthering Heights, but Brideshead Revisited has a claim as literature's finest schlock. (Troy Patterson)

We get the point but still we don't like to describe Wuthering Heights as fine or not fine schlock.

Aelfwine from El Espejo Gótico translates a couple of poems by Emily Brontë into Spanish: How Clear She Shines! and When I Shall Sleep. Her first biography, Agnes Mary Frances Robinson's Emily Brontë (1883) is now available on The Gutenberg Project (there's another link to the Archive website .txt file on our sidebar but Gutenberg's .txt version is more accurate). My Reading Spot briefly reviews Wuthering Heights.

Categories: Biography, Poetry, References, Translations, Wuthering Heights