Date of Award

2010

Degree Type

Thesis

Department

English

First Advisor

Dyer, Gary

Subject Headings

Man-woman relationships -- England -- Yorkshire, Yorkshire (England) -- Fiction, England -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction

Abstract

Emily Bronte's sole novel, Wuthering Heights, is unusual among nineteenth-century works due to the non-specificity of its locations. While many of her contemporaries were very specific in the use of their settings, using real place names and locations that paralleled real-life locations of the time very closely, Bronte uses details of place that make it impossible to draw one-to-one correspondence between her settings and real-life locales, and includes details that serve to remind the reader that the places in which her story takes place, and thus the story itself, are unreal. She does this in order to exert total narrative control over her universe. This enables Bronte as an author to force her readers to confront the issue of power, since the reader must engage Bronte's narrative universe on the author's terms

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