Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is deeply entangled in the reproduction of imperialist sentiment, including notions of racial otherness and white (English) supremacy, as has long been established by a range of scholars.1 Indeed, the rise of fields such as critical race studies and postcolonial studies has been accompanied by a mounting awareness of the extent to which not only Brontë and her sisters2 but in fact a wide range of Victorian novelists were shaped by colonial discourse, and how they contributed to empire being “processed and naturalized” in nineteenth-century Britain (Perera 7).3 References to empire and plantation economies, however marginal, frequently enable nineteenth-century novelists to install powerful game changers in their plots: white protagonists in distress turn to empire and find affordable routes to financial wealth, happiness, independence, individuality, and/or subjecthood. They encounter manifold “realms of possibility” (Said 75) and reap “just rewards”...
Follow the Hatred: The Production of Negative Feeling in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights
CAROLINE KOEGLER is assistant professor of British literary and cultural studies at the University of Muenster, Germany. She is currently writing a book on the cultural politics of emotion in long eighteenth-century literature, with a particular focus on intersectionality. She is author of Critical Branding: Postcolonial Studies and the Market (2018) and coeditor of Locating African European Studies: Interventions-Intersections-Conversations (2020). Other current publications include the coedited special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies “Queering Neo-Victorianism beyond Sarah Waters” (2020), the coedited special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing titled “Writing Brexit: Colonial Remains” (2020), and a coedited collection, Law, Literature, and Citizenship (2021).
Caroline Koegler; Follow the Hatred: The Production of Negative Feeling in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Novel 1 August 2021; 54 (2): 270–286. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-9004531
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