Passion beyond death? Tracing "Wuthering Heights" in Stephenie Meyer's "Eclipse"
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.185Keywords:
Popular fiction, Victorian novel, gothic romance, intertextuality, protofeminist interpretation, reactionary discourseAbstract
Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight tetralogy has lately become an enormously successful phenomenon in contemporary popular fiction, especially among a young adult readership. Regarded as a mixture of genres, the Twilight series can be described as a paradigm of contemporary popularculture gothic romance. Stephenie Meyer has recently acknowledged she bore one literary classic in mind when writing each of the volumes in the series. In particular, her third book, Eclipse (2007), is loosely based on Emily Brontë’s Victorian classic Wuthering Heights (1847). This paper aims at providing a comparative analysis of both Brontë’s novel and Meyer’s adaptation, taking into consideration the way the protofeminist discourse that underlines Brontë’s text is not only subverted but also acquires significantly reactionary undertones in Meyer’s popular romance despite its contemporariness.Downloads
References
Alexander, Christine and Margaret Smith. 2003. The Oxford Companion to the Brontës. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Batsleer, Janet. 1997. “Pulp in the Pink”. Reading Popular Narrative: A Source Book. Ed. Bob Ashley. Leicester: Leicester University Press. 217-222.
Botting, Fred. 2004. Gothic. London: Routledge.
Brontë, Emily. 1992 (1847). Wuthering Heights. Ed. Linda H. Peterson. Boston: Bedford Book of St. Martin’s Press.
Chase, Richard. 1986. “The Brontës: A Centennial Observance”. The Brontës: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Ian Gregor. London: Prentice-Hall. 19-33.
Davies, Stevie. 1998. Emily Brontë. Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers.
Ferguson Ellis, Kate. 2000. “Can You Forgive Her? The Gothic Heroine and Her Critics.” A Companion to the Gothic. Ed. David Punter. Oxford: Blackwell. 257-268.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. 1984 (1979). The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New York and London: Yale University Press.
Hoppenstand, Gary. 1997. Popular Fiction: An Anthology. New York: Longman.
Joyce, Simon. 2002. “The Victorians in the Rear-view Mirror”. Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time. Ed. Christine L. Krueger. Ohio: Ohio University Press. 3-17.
Kaplan, Cora. 2007. Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Kohkle, Marie-Luise. 2008. “Introduction: Speculations in and on the Neo-Victorian Encounter”. Neo-Victorian Studies 1(1): 1-18.
Krueger, Christine L., ed. 2002. Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time. Ohio: Ohio University Press.
Kucich, John and Dianne F. Sadoff, eds. 2000. Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth-Century. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Light, Alison. 1997. “‘Returning to Manderley’: Romance Fiction, Female Sexuality and Class”. Reading Popular Narrative: A Source Book. Ed. Bob Ashley. Leicester: Leicester University Press. 222-226.
Meyer, Stephenie. 2009 (2007). Eclipse. London: Atom.
Miller, Laura. 2007. “Touched by a Vampire”. Salon.com. <http://www.salon.com/books/review/2008/07/30/Twilight/> (Accessed 26 June 2010)
Moers, Ellen. 1977. Literary Women: The Great Writers. New York: Doubleday.
Moran, Maureen. 2006. Victorian Literature and Culture. London: Continuum.
Proctor, Maurine. 2008. “Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight”. Meridian. <http://www.meridianmagazine.com/books/080806vampire.html> (Accessed 26 June 2010)
Seifert, Christine. 2008. “Bite Me! (or Don’t)”. Bitchmagazine.org. <http://bitchmagazine.org/article/bite-me-or-dont> (Accessed 26 June 2010)
Showalter, Elaine. 1999. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Stevens, David. 2010. The Gothic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stoneman, Patsy. 1996. Brontë Transformations. The Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. London: Prentice-Hall.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
The authors retain copyright of articles and authorize Journal of English Studies the first publication. They are free to share, redistribute, and/or reprint the article without obtaining permission from the publisher as long as they give appropriate credit to the editor and the journal.
Self-archiving is allowed too. In fact, it is recommendable to deposit a PDF version of the paper in academic and/or institutional repositories.
It is recommended to include the DOI number.
This journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
