Determining Wuthering Heights

Acknowledgements - Introduction - An Overview of Wuthering Heights' Critical Reception: Problems and Omissions - Wuthering Heights: "The Housekeeper's Tale" - Wuthering Heights and Kleist's Novellen: Rousseauian Nature, Implosive Communities and the Performative Subversion of the Law - Wuthering Heights: A Gothic Novel - Wuthering Heights: An Epic Poem - Wuthering Heights: A Social Novel - Wuthering Heights: A Bildungsroman - Conclusions - Afterword by Julián Jiménez Heffernan - Index.

Dr. María Valero Redondo holds a European Doctorate obtained at the University of Córdoba, Spain. She is Lecturer at the Department of English and German Philology, University of Córdoba. She has been a Visiting Student at the University of Cambridge and the University of Kent. Her main research interest is nineteenth-century English literature.

"This book puts right the prevailing critical tradition that Wuthering Heights is an isolated anomaly in the evolution of the English Victorian novel. By means of a set of detailed analyses of relevant eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century works in relation to Wuthering Heights, the author convincingly proves its full integration in the literary context of the period. Her attempt provides moreover a new lease of life for intertextuality studies, which had languished for at least two decades now under the pressure of critical movements more concerned with the 'absolute' meaning yielded by this work when looked at from different angles (biographical, historical, Marxist, feminist, post-colonial, etc.) than with its links across a dense meaning-making network of intertextual relations. In order to argue her point, María Valero Redondo places Wuthering Heights in conversation with texts ranging from Richardson's Pamela (1740) to Dickens's Great Expectations (1861), including predictable narratives such as Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) and Shirley (1849), but also mildly startling ones such as Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), Byron's poem Manfred (1817), and Heinrich von Kleist's Novellen, especially Der Findling. I am happy to endorse the publication of this book for a number of reasons. First, for the originality and novelty of its attempt. Valero Redondo's critical method is much more than a mere philological hunt for sources and echoes; it comes closer, in my view, to Eliot's systematic, synchronic conception of literary tradition as the sum total of combined efforts that shape the ever-spiralling trajectory of verbal art. Second, for the impressive breadth of the textual material she brings to bear on her intertextual study of Wuthering Heights. This gives her critical conclusions a strong air of assurance and dependability. And third, for her successful effort to reinstate intertextual studies in the current critical mainstream. I have no doubt that this