Fearsome, Uncanny, Gothic, Multicultural...

A couple of new scholarly works with some common interests:

Fearsome Worlds and Uncanny Children: Gothic Early Childhoods in Condé’s La Migration des coeurs and Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother

Suzanne Manizza Roszak

Contemporary Women's Writing, vpab035, https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpab035

Published: 30 September 2021

Gothic depictions of early childhood and its antecedents from conception to childbirth stand to fundamentally shape readers’ understanding of colonialism across the transnational and translinguistic space of the Caribbean. This effect is particularly visible in contemporary novels such as Maryse Condé’s La Migration des coeurs (1995) and Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), which not only have been interpreted as rewritings of Wuthering Heights but also draw on a larger, more multicultural Gothic literary tradition. In their renderings of sexual violence, doomed pregnancies, and motherless infancy, Condé and Kincaid appropriate and edit Gothic conventions, highlighting persisting ramifications of the colonial project for women and children. Gothic youth also functions as a subversive site of resistance with the potential to dismantle imperialist ideologies and systems.

How does a black Heathcliff affect Wuthering Heights?
Baiden, Jakob

Bachelor thesis, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 2021

This thesis seeks to examine how the casting of black actors to play Heathcliff in ‘Wuthering Heights’ (2011) affects the story by discussing perspectives of the interplay of light and dark in the film, considering Heathcliff as a tragic hero, and as a Romantic hero, while comparing him to a hypothetical white Heathcliff. I believe that the examination conducted indicates that through casting James Howson and Solomon Glave as Heathcliff, Arnold affected the story by making adding weight and complexity to central elements. The impossibility and tragedy of the love between Catherine and Heathcliff gains gravity as he becomes more of an outsider, and their relationship becomes more significant as it more explicitly defies social conventions. In other words, a black Heathcliff becomes another layer that adds depth and complexity to his character, its tragedy, as well as its impressiveness, their relationship, and the story as a whole.