Contemporary analysis of Wuthering Heights necessitates a re-appraisal in light of advancements in the study of incest in non-literary fields such as history, anthropology, and especially psychology. A modern reading suggests that an unconscious incest taboo impeded Heathcliff and Cathy's expectation of normal sexual union and led them to seek union after death. John Milton's Paradise Lost provides a paradigm by which to examine the consequences of incest from two perspectives: that of incest as a metaphor for evil, as represented in Heathcliff; that of incest as symbolic of pre-Lapsarian innocence, as represented in Cathy. The tragic consequences of Heathcliff and Cathy's incestuous fixation are resolved by the socially-condoned marriage of Hareton and Catherine, which illuminates Bronte's belief in the Miltonic theme that good inevitably triumphs over evil.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

My thesis researched memory and perception through an examination of surfaces. Acting as skin, boundary, veil, or terrain, the surfaces I created revealed imprints and residues that offered information used to clarify distorted perceptions. I attempted to locate evidence in parts of my body, and in physical matter, that contained a record of history. The work was often site specific, with the wall playing an intrinsic role in the construction of these pieces, made of paper, thread, and wax. Their surfaces referenced landscapes of the earth and of the body, a mental terrain shaped over time by the paths of repetitive thoughts and the steady advance of emotional forces. In the end, the surfaces asked more questions than they could answer, and it was this mystery within the surfaces that I would devote myself to. The work embraced ambiguity, shadows, and what was hidden beneath the surface.

This thesis explores the notion of rurality as a form of constructed identity. Just as feminist and postcolonial studies identify the formation of hierarchies within gender and ethnicity, I argue that the rural is constructed as inferior in opposition to its binary counterpart, the urban. The effect of this is the othering of the rural. This thesis takes Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights as a case study, using a critical approach to explore the ways in which it presents rurality, and to consider its role in the creation and reproduction of rural identity. The case study suggests that the adoption of a ‘rural reading’, in which an awareness of rural othering is fostered, can be a useful and productive strategy in textual analysis and interpretation. The first three chapters of this thesis focus on rural construction generally. Chapter 1 draws on semiotic theory to examine the creation of binaries, and Derridean notions of linguistic hierarchies to suggest reasons for the inferior position of the rural. Chapter 2 considers the historical location of the urban/rural binary in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, within the context of the Enlightenment, the growth of capitalism, industrialisation and rapid urban expansion. Chapter 3 explores rural othering as a feature of contemporary culture, examining the textual presence of idyllic and anti-idyllic versions of the rural. Chapter 4 introduces the methodology of the case study, explaining the relevance of Wuthering Heights to the study of rural othering, providing a précis of the novel and an overview of previous critical responses. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 explore the three themes of nature, deviance and space. These are derived from the examination of rural construction in Chapter 3. In Chapter 5, the representation of nature in Wuthering Heights is explored, and the presence of animals within the novel in particular. In Chapter 6, the depiction of deviance in Wuthering Heights is discussed, with special focus given to the presence of deviant speech patterns, reflecting changing expectations of behavioural norms in the early nineteenth century. Chapter 7’s consideration of the relationship between space and rurality within Brontë’s novel considers her representation of landscape. Chapter 8 argues that a similar rural reading can be applied to other texts, literary and otherwise, opening up a fresh set of perspectives and possibilities for interpretation.

Emily Dickinson's poetry functions where scientific attention to the physical world and abstract theorizing about the ineffable intersect. Critics who emphasize the poet's dedication to the scientific often take for granted how deeply the uncertainty that underlies all of Dickinson's poetry opposes scientific discussion of the day. Meteorology is an exceptional nineteenth-century science because it takes as its subject complex systems which are inexplicable in Newtonian terms. As such, meteorology can articulate the ways that Dickinson bridges the divide between the unknown and the known, particularly as she relates to the interplay of nature and culture, the role of careful observation in the face of uncertainty, and issues of home and dwelling. These are themes integral to and further elaborated by contemporary ecocritical discourse.

Emily Dickinson was a poet who existed at the center of her nineteenth-century United States culture and yet wrote from a periphery located at the edge of her being. Integral to understanding her poetry is a contextual awareness of her spiritual struggle. The experience of cultural marginalization and the way it informs art through a peripheral perspective has been the focus of examination in much of modern and post-modern literary studies where attention is given as much to an author's cultural station as to his or her artistic creation. A close study of Emily Dickinson's poetry reveals a spiritually marginalized perspective which closely resembles the structural framework of cultural marginalization. While there are areas of Dickinson's poetic perspective where these two experiences merge, my examination of Dickinson concentrates on her personal spiritual liminality in her relationship with God as expressed in the context of her poetry and letters. / by Linda Pergolizzi Gallagher. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2007. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, FL : 2007 Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This thesis covers the entire range of British and American film adaptations of Emily Brontë’s novel, Wuthering Heights, as no cumulative study on this larger selection has been done thus far. However this will not be the only objective of this thesis, as I create a link between the author’s life to her novel, between the novel to the early criticism, and the criticism to later adaptations, forming a chain of transformation down the ages, to the original novel. By linking the adaptations to the earlier reception of the novel, a change of social interaction will be uncovered as one of its reasons for surviving. These examples of adaptation will be shown to be just as relevant to popular culture history as its original inspiration. This is the result of an unfolding movement of change and mutation, where each adaptation pushes to connect with the past and future. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Through the use of biographical materials, and three selected works from Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Bronte, parallels were found between their lives, character design, and the plot of their works. The lack of a mother figure in the lives of the Bronte sisters caused their upbringing to differ from that of other children, and as a result influenced their perspective of the world. Motherless female characters were found in each of the three novels by the Bronte sisters and in each instance commonalities were shared with the author of the work, to a degree that indicates that the lives that the sisters led, was the inspiration for the stories they created. After investigating whether or not the novels created by the Bronte sisters were influenced by the lack of a mother figure, the conclusion reached, is that this absence had an immense influence throughout their lives, and based on more than one account, helped shape the design of each of their respective works.

Paul Celan's translations of Emily Dickinson's poems Because I could not stop for Death and Let down the Bars, Oh Death illuminate the global metaphor inherent in both poems' exploration of death. Celan's The Meridian speech, coupled with Dickinson's poems I saw no way and Tell all the truth, suggest that language can move in different directions across a globe at the same time. When these different lines meet, they reach a meridian of the spiritual and the material. As Celan translates Dickinson's two poems, he uses this global metaphor to place more emphasis on death and to further illuminate how ambiguity is used in the poems to represent what death is, thus highlighting Dickinson's original project in her death poems.

Taking a cue from the occasional reticence of the often-exuberant American Romantic poetics, this project tracks what I call “rhetorics of silence” in verse: those moments where words are declared to be inadequate, impertinent, unavailable, unintelligible or otherwise unsuitable for a task that the poet has proposed. In this respect, the term “silence” functions here as a broad metaphor encompassing a number of meta-linguistic or meta-poetic gestures aimed at highlighting the shortcomings of knowledge and representation. Whereas earlier critics have noticed these silences in haphazard ways, this project looks toward a systematic account of why and when nineteenth-century poets rely on gestures to the space beyond language. This intervention is especially useful for reading the seminal American poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Because Whitman seems celebratory and Dickinson doleful, it has often been difficult to offer productive readings of the two in tandem. Where Whitman does resemble Dickinson, it is often thought to be in his poems that abandon or despair of his project for a democratic poetics. By contrast, working through the lyric and political verse of the lesser-known poetry of John Rollin Ridge, this project reads visionary and despairing silences as alike rhetorical gestures aimed at highlighting the common humanity of the poet and the reader. “Silence” is therefore an outgrowth of American ideology, albeit one that frequently allows poets to expand and query that ideology in ways that are not possible in the many corresponding but often blither deployments of rhetorical silence in the culture at large.