Brontë Studies. Volume 45. Issue 2

The new issue of Brontë Studies (Volume 45 Issue 2, April 2020) is already available online. We provide you with the table of contents and abstracts:

Emily Brontë: A Peculiar Music

Editorial
pp. 83-88  Author: Sarah E. Fanning

‘I would have touched the heavenly key’: Dissonance in Emily Brontë’s Fragments and William Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’
pp.  89-103  Author: Quinnell, James
Abstract: 
This paper explores the dissonance created when Emily Brontë’s striving to find language that equals her ‘world within’ is constrained by the ‘world without’. The title quotation, the opening line of one of Brontë’s early fragments, highlights the intensity of her desire to wake the song that so moved her in the past. It is Emily Brontë’s struggle to wake the ‘entrancing song’ coupled with the pull of the ‘heavenly key’ that impels her poetry. In her treatment of desire to re-enter states of past bliss, Emily Brontë is an heir of Wordsworth. Reading her poems alongside Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, I explore how Wordsworth’s cry of ‘Whither is fled the visionary gleam’ is also Brontë’s. Yet, this dissonance is for both poets, to use Emily’s own words, a ‘darling pain’. The longing, even with the pain, is a form of fulfilment. So, I conclude by arguing that this seeming dissonance is what gives Brontë’s poetry its ‘peculiar music’.

Wuthering Heights and King Lear: Revisited
pp. 104-115 Author: Moorhouse Marr, Edwin John
Abstract: 
Apart from religious literature, King Lear is the only text referenced explicitly within Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. This article will expand existing scholarship within this field in order to argue that, by alluding to King Lear within her novel, Brontë invites us to draw implicit comparisons between the two texts. I will therefore analyse their comparable structures, their shared handling of violence and revenge, their depictions of the natural world and their exploration of the concept of nothing, to demonstrate how Brontë frames her novel against the backdrop of Shakespearean tragedy.

Wiser than thy sire’: Youth and Age in Emily Brontë’s Poetry
pp.  116-131   Author: Cook, Peter
Abstract: 
A significant number of Emily Brontë’s poems explore the contrasting states of youth and age. In most of them Brontë creates a dialogue between personae representing the two states, and calls into question traditional moral values by examining the relationship between her personae and the natural world. Her conclusions and ways of working in these poems, and in Wuthering Heights, formed a seminal conduit between the ideas of Romantic writers and the mid-nineteenth century, and at the same time achieved a radical reworking of these ideas and values for her own time and place.

Queer Temporalities: Resisting Family, Reproduction and Lineage in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
pp. 132-143  Author: Datskou, Emily
Abstract: 
Following two generations of families on the Yorkshire moors, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) focuses on family, reproduction and lineage, and thus seems to follow a heteronormative sense of time. However, as this article argues, when read within a queer theoretical context, we see that Emily actually produces a queer temporality in the novel through the duplication of characters and plot events. Because the characters and the plot structure largely repeat the events of the past, the novel’s plot cannot be said to progress but instead essentially turns back on itself. This article also suggests that reading the novel in this way may provide a new way of thinking about how Emily may have felt about her identity and her role in her family and nineteenth-century society.

Ghost Writing: Emily Brontë and Spectrality
pp. 144-155 Author: Marsden, Simon
Abstract:
This article considers the role of spectrality in Emily Brontë’s writing, focussing on her Gondal poem ‘Written in Aspin Castle’ (1842–3) and Wuthering Heights. Brontë’s use of spectrality demonstrates both her understanding of Gothic narrative conventions and her awareness of popular traditions of haunting. These influences are reflected in her use of sceptical narrators who encounter versions of sublime terror and in her insistence upon a connection between haunting and place. Yet ghosts also disrupt the places in which they appear, rendering the home ‘unhomely’ to its present inhabitants and disrupting clear divisions between past and present. Indeed, the disruption of boundaries is integral to Brontë’s use of the spectre and reflects her familiarity with the apocalyptic tradition as well as the ghost story. The article concludes by arguing that spectrality in Brontë’s writing is inseparable from the Romantic impulse to see beyond the surfaces of things: to open oneself to the experience of the sublime in nature is also to open oneself to the possibility of ghosts.

Heathcliff, Race and Adam Low’s Documentary, A Regular Black: The Hidden Wuthering Heights (2010)
pp. 156-167 Author: O'Callaghan,Claire and Stewart, Michael
Abstract:
This paper presents an interview discussion of race and slavery in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) in relation to Adam Low’s documentary, A Regular Black: The Hidden Wuthering Heights (2010) and Michael Stewart’s novel, Ill Will: The Untold Story of Heathcliff (2018). Our discussion originally took place after a screening of Low’s documentary on the first day of the conference, ‘Emily Brontë: A Peculiar Music’, held in September 2018 in York to mark Emily’s bicentenary. The material presented here is based on a recording of our evening event, but we continued our discussion afterwards in person and via email. Where possible we have nuanced our original talk and developed aspects of the discussion.

Interpreting Emily: Ekphrasis and Allusion in Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Editor’s Preface’ to Wuthering Heights
pp. 168-182 Author: Regis, Amber K.
Abstract:
In writing her ‘Editor’s Preface’ to Wuthering Heights in 1850, Charlotte Brontë reimagined Emily’s novel as a statue roughly hewn from ‘a granite block on a solitary moor’. The statue stands before us, wrought in words: an ekphrasis; a border-crossing between the arts, present here, in Brontë’s preface, as an attempt to render the visual and plastic in verbal form (and vice versa). The gesture is also multiply allusive, weaving together the language of Wuthering Heights, the judgement of literary critics, and ideas concerning poetry and permanence derived from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ (1818). This article performs an extended close reading of the novel-statue, exploring the rhetorical work it performs as part of Brontë’s careful negotiation of Emily’s posthumous print identity. As an editor, biographer and preface-writer, Brontë used the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights to transform Emily’s art: she inscribes a different legacy for her sister, reimagining the dead novelist as a poet yet to find her audience.

Muse, Sister, Myth: The Cultural Afterlives of Emily Brontë on Screen
pp. 183-195 Author: Shachar, Hila
Abstract:
This article was originally delivered as a keynote lecture at the Bicentenary Conference for Emily Brontë, Emily Brontë: A Peculiar Music (7–9 September 2018, Marriott Hotel, York). It explores the cultural portrayal and legacy of Emily Brontë through an analysis of several representative screen adaptations of both her biography and her novel, Wuthering Heights. It uses the recent BBC biopic directed by Sally Wainwright, To Walk Invisible (2016), as the guiding screen adaptation around which to discuss the various ways Emily Brontë has been adapted as a cultural persona on screen, imagined in various guises as a mystical author, a radical feminist ‘sister’, and a muse for our contemporary age. Moving from classic Hollywood film to recent independent and BBC productions, this article suggests that Emily Brontë has become implicated in wider and ongoing cultural debates about authorial identity, gender and myths of creativity that contemporary culture has inherited from the nineteenth century.

A Peculiar Illusion: Narrative Technique and the Lovers in Wuthering Heights
pp. 196-208 Author: Stoneman, Patsy
Abstract:
This paper draws attention to a curious but widespread illusion about Wuthering Heights: that Catherine and Heathcliff meet as adult lovers on the hilltop of Penistone Crag. There may be commercial reasons why film-makers promote this image, but many readers of the novel believe that they have read such a scene, and can hardly be persuaded that it is not there in the novel. In fact, we only read of Catherine and Heathcliff alone together out of doors at a time when they cannot be more than twelve years old. I want to suggest that this illusion depends on aspects of the novel’s narrative technique which have such a powerful effect on us that they persuade us that we have ‘seen’ what is not actually there in the novel — the image of Catherine and Heathcliff, as adults, speaking their love to one another on top of Penistone Crag.