Occulted Landscape and Protest

New scholar papers just published:

The Ontological Work of Genre and Place: Wuthering Heights and the Case of the Occulted Landscape

Lauren M. E. Goodlad

Victorian Literature & Culture,  Volume 49 , Special Issue 1: Special Issue: The Wide Nineteenth Century , Spring 2021 , pp. 107 - 138

This essay shows how genre and place enable the “ontological reading” of narrative fiction. Such sense-making dialectics enable readers to infer the terms of existence that shape fictional worlds. World-systems thinkers have theorized the critical premise of material worlds shaped though ongoing processes of combined and uneven development. Ontological reading is a comparative practice for studying the narrative work of “figuring out” those processes—for example, through the “occulted landscapes” of Yorkshire noir. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights can be likened to a species of crime fiction in prefiguring the “hardboiled” pull from epistemological certainty to ontological complication. Whereas David Peace's millennial Red Riding series of novels and films palimpsestically layers multiple pasts and presents, Wuthering Heights’ photomontage-like landscape airbrushes the seams of combined and uneven histories. Both narratives evoke moorland terrains conducive to a long history of woolens manufacturing reliant on the energized capital and trade flows of Atlantic slavery. Both works body forth occulted landscapes with the capacity to narrate widely: their troubling of ontological difference—between human and animal, life and death, past and present, nature and supernature—lays the ground for generically flexile stories of regional becoming. Ontological reading thus widens literary study.

Voice of Protest in the Brontë Fiction
Dr Poonam Kumari

Research Review, Oct. 2020, Year - 7 (90)

This is the crucial and thematically the central chapter of the thesis "Voice of Protest in the Brontë Fiction: An Integrated Feminist Study" where women in the Bronte novels are portrayed as crying and protesting against the male-constructed hegemony in all its possible ramifications. More often thannot, women express their grievances through silence or through body language. Men should psychologically read and redress it, which left unheeded, constrains them to cry in agony; remains unheard, women rise in revolt and raise their feminist Voice of Protest in opposition to all that could be masculinist, and create an equitable world for the sexes called the Brontë world.