Geography 'invading' fiction : Wuthering Heights as a case study

The “Spatial Turn” as a transdisciplinary phenomenon in the humanities was established in the 1990s to explain the increasing concern of academics in social sciences for space in the 1960s and 1970s. Geography seems to have invaded philosophical and critical language, among other spheres. Literary cartography, literary geography, geopoetics, geocriticism and ecocriticism have their specificities but they all agree upon the omnipresence of space, place and mapping in the analysis of narrative texts. These new interdisciplinary methods prioritize geographical practices in literary criticism. The com-mon point among all these approaches is the cross-fertilization of categories as different as geo-graphy, ecology, psychology, sociology and literature, their intersections, and the way they work on different and overlapping levels. My contention is that literature and geography are two interconnected discourses related to space, that literature is “invaded” by geography and both are validated by their representations of space. Textual and real places interact producing “spatial narratives”. Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë is an excellent case study. What certainly characterizes Brontë’s novel is its topography, including the valley, the moors, the two houses and annexed pro-perties. Although the sources have been meticulously collected from a wide range of models across a large area of the country in Yorkshire, they have been reassembled to form a landscape that is both familiar and uncanny, self-consistent and reminiscent of real buildings and places. The Yorkshire bleak and bare moorland, the limestone hills, Gimmerton village, the crossroad, park and farming grounds take on a specific meaning as Emily Brontë’s characters’ are embedded in natural space, both in life and death.