Know Your English Literature Part. VI

Wuthering Heights: Romantic novel by Emily Bronte published in 1847. It tells the story of the passionate but troubled relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and the brooding Heathcliff, a homeless youth taken in by her family. Heathcliff overhears Catherine say that it would degrade her to marry him, and he leaves the house in a fury. Three years later Heathcliff returns to seeking vengeance.

A series of disasters ensue; most notably, Catherine now married to the feeble Edward Linton – dies in child birth. The story ends with Heathcliff’s death- which he greets as a reunion with his beloved Catherine. Wuthering Heights is the name of the Earnshaws’ home on the Yorkshire moors.

Ulysses: Controversial novel, experimental in form, written by the Irish author James Joyce and published in Paris in 1922, although not in England until 1936 because of obscenity laws. Ulysses deals with the experiences of a small number of Dublin characters as they go about their business on June16th, 1904- ad date now known as Blooms day. In themselves the events are ordinary, everyday occurrences, but Joyce describes them in terms of episodes from Homers Odyssey.

    The main characters are a middle aged Jewish   advertisement salesman Leopold Bloom (representing Homer’s hero Odysseus), a young poet Stephen Dedalus to whom Bloom acts as a father figure and leopold’s wife Molly.

     Ulysses introduce Stream of consciousness into English writing and greatly influence the modern novel.

Wife of Bath: one of the pilgrims in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. She is robust, colorful character that who has had five husbands –all now dead- and is sometimes seen as an early feminist. The wife of Bath launches a spirited attack on chastity and female submissiveness.