"Frankenstein," "Wuthering Heights," and the Oscars: Revisiting the Novels behind Today’s Film Adaptations
This year has seen a number of popular film adaptations of novels spanning the nineteenth century. With the Oscars fast approaching on March 15, we wanted to spotlight some articles on two novels whose adaptations have generated a lot of buzz recently, from controversy to high praise: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). Contemporary reviewers of each of the novels were baffled by their strangeness, with one saying of Frankenstein that it left them in a “painful and bewildered state of mind” (The Edinburgh Magazine, March 1818), and another of Wuthering Heights, “The general effect is inexpressibly painful. We know nothing in the whole range of our fictitious literature which presents such shocking pictures of the worst forms of humanity” (Atlas, January 1848). We hope these articles will help you parse these two strangely powerful works—and relieve some of the bewilderment.
What Freedom?”: Frankenstein, Anti-Occidentalism, and English Liberty
John Owen Havard
Nineteenth-Century Literature (2019) 74 (3): 305–331.
Writing the Disaster: Franklin and Frankenstein
Adriana Craciun
Nineteenth-Century Literature (2011) 65 (4): 433–480.
Counter-narratives: Wuthering Heights and the Intervals of the Brutalized Self
Adrian A. Husain
Nineteenth-Century Literature (2021) 76 (1): 33–56.
"My name was Isabella Linton": Coverture, Domestic Violence, and Mrs. Heathcliff's Narrative in Wuthering Heights
Judith E. Pike
Nineteenth-Century Literature (2009) 64 (3): 347–383.
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