Narrative Review of Declining Feudalism in English Literature: With Emphasis on Wuthering Heights

New historicism has highlighted the reflection of the historical events in literary texts. Based on this view, the fictional language of literary texts creates no barrier for the study of historical trends within the text. In other words, due to their polyphonic nature, these texts are regarded as valuable resources for a critical interpretation of historical events. New historicists believe that representations and symbols of power, authority, conflict and tension used in literary texts are proper criteria for the evaluation of historical significances. In principal, texts of literature are products and representations of political narratives which are shaped around the power in a special historical period. Using this approach, the current study tries to examine the narrative-historical elements in “Wuthering Heights”, a novel which clearly indicates the class struggles in the Victorian England. The contrasts represented in the novel prove that, firstly, the aristocrats did not adopt a single approach in dealing with the new developments brought about by the Industrial Revolution. Secondly, part of the aristocrats’ rejection of the new developments was beyond the class issue. In other words, it was rooted in the aristocrats’ epistemological fear of losing the existing balance between the human and nature. As Emily Brontë elaborates in the novel, one of the main concerns at that time was the diminishing balance between culture and nature.