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While teaching in Japan, Judith Pascoe was fascinated to discover the popularity that Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights has enjoyed there. Nearly 100 years after its first formal introduction to the country, the novel continues to engage the imaginations of Japanese novelists, filmmakers, manga artists and others, resulting in numerous translations, adaptations, and dramatizations. On the Bullet Train with Emily Brontë is Pascoe’s lively account of her quest to discover the reasons for the continuous Japanese embrace of Wuthering Heights, including quite varied and surprising adaptations of the novel. At the same time, the book chronicles Pascoe’s experience as an adult student of Japanese. She contemplates the multiple Japanese translations of Brontë, as contrasted to the single (or non-existent) English translations of major Japanese writers. Carrying out a close reading of a distant country’s Wuthering Heights, Pascoe begins to see American literary culture as a small island on which readers are isolated from foreign literature.
 
In this and in her previous book, The Sarah Siddons Audio Files, Pascoe’s engaging narrative innovates a new scholarly form involving immersive research practice to attempt a cross-cultural version of reader-response criticism. On the Bullet Train with Emily Brontë will appeal to scholars in the fields of 19th-century British literature, adaptation studies, and Japanese literary history.

Emily Brontë’s beloved novel Wuthering Heights has been adapted countless times for film and television over the decades. Valérie V.Hazette offers here a historical and transnational study of those adaptations, presenting the afterlife of the book as a series of cultural journeys that focuses as much on the readers, filmmakers, and viewers as on the dramas themselves. Taking in the British silent film; French, Mexican, and Japanese versions; the British television serials; and more, this richly theoretical volume is the first comprehensive global analysis of the adaptation of Wuthering Heights for film and television.

Wuthering Heights at once fascinates and frustrates the reader with the highly charged, passionate and problematic relationships it portrays. This study provides a key to the text by examining the temporal and narrative rhythms through which Brontë presents the dualities by which we commonly define our selfhood: child and adult, female and male, symbiosis and separateness, illogic and common sense, classlessness and classboundedness, play and power, free will and determinism. The novel’s concern with unitary and fragmentary selves has romantic antecedents in DeQuincey and Shelley and in Charlotte Brontë’s figuration of Emily as a lost other self. This concern is, in turn, reflected in the “after-life” of the text in the work of later artists such as George Eliot, Lawrence, Buñuel, and Truffaut.