Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights has been called the most beautiful, most profoundly violent love story of all time. At its center are Catherine and Heathcliff, and the self-contained world of Wuthering Heights, Thrushcross Grange, and the wild Yorkshire moors that the characters inhabit. “I am Heathcliff”, Catherine declares. In her introduction Janet Gezari examines Catherine’s assertion and in her notes maps it to questions that flicker like stars in the novel s dark dreamscape. How do we determine who and what we are? What do the people closest to us contribute to our sense of identity? The Annotated Wuthering Heights provides those encountering the novel for the first time as well as those returning to it with a wide array of contexts in which to read Brontë’s romantic masterpiece. Gezari explores the philosophical, historical, economic, political, and religious contexts of the novel and its connections with Brontë’s other writing, particularly her poems. The annotations unpack Brontës allusions to the Bible, Shakespeare, and her other reading; elucidate her references to topics including folklore, educational theory, and slavery; translate the thick Yorkshire dialect of Joseph, the surly, bigoted manservant at the Heights; and help with other difficult or unfamiliar words and phrases. Handsomely illustrated with many color images that vividly recreate both Brontë’s world and the earlier Yorkshire setting of her novel, this newly edited and annotated text will delight and instruct the scholar and general reader alike.
Image and text reproduced from Amazon (accessed 18/12/25)
Film Still: Letters to the Landscape, Moving Image, approx.25 minutes. Found photographs, polaroids and letters from the Director’s Collection, curated by Victoria Hermita, Keeper of the Collection, Editor and P.A to the Director, George Howlette
Denise Startin is an artist, writer, and researcher who stages an interdisciplinary and performative archival practice through embodied fieldwork, dramatis personae, and the politics of memory. Working across moving image, photography, installation, site-specific interventions, and performance writing, she explores how archival fragments, textual, visual, and artefactual, can be reinterpreted through sensory gestures and narrative slippage. Her work reframes the archive not as a static repository but as a haunted, migratory space, one that moves across media, bodies, and temporalities. Through walking, (re)collecting, re-enacting, writing, re-citing, reciting and remembering, she activates the landscape as a mnemonic terrain and the archive as a site of negotiation, where memory is contested, reanimated, and re-authored.
Central to her methodology is the use of dramatis personae who act as narrative interlocutors, structuring devices and speculative tools that enable a slippage between researcher and archive, past and present, fact and fiction. These rhetorical figures operate as explorers, (mis)guides, and mnemonic surrogates, enabling a mode of fieldwork that is both materially grounded and imaginatively expansive. Through them, the archive becomes a vehicle of resonance, resistance, and reimagination, staging historiographic instability and opening space for embodied speculation, where gestures of citation are enacted rather than merely recorded. Her current research, undertaken as part of a practice-based PhD at the University of Leeds, is situated in Brontë Country, West Yorkshire, and investigates place as a medium of cultural memory and a terrain where bodies, landscapes, and narratives converge. The work privileges fragment, rupture, and affective resonance over institutional fixity, proposing a methodology of situated refusal, a way of inhabiting the archive without claiming it. This approach foregrounds the politics of memory, whose stories are told, whose gestures are preserved, and insists on the archive as a live site of encounter.
Art + Archive provides an in-depth analysis of the connection between art and the archive at the turn of the twenty-first century. The book examines how the archive emerged in art writing in the mid-1990s and how its subsequent ubiquity can be understood in light of wider social, technological, philosophical and art-historical conditions and concerns. Deftly combining writing on archives from different disciplines with artistic practices, the book clarifies the function and meaning of one of the most persistent artworld buzzwords of recent years, shedding light on the conceptual and historical implications of the so-called archival turn in contemporary art.
Letters to the Landscape brings together haunting, de-archiving, and displacement as interwoven strategies of resistance, contributing to ongoing conversations around feminist historiography, embodied research, and the politics of cultural memory. This work is a cinematic essay, practice-led investigation and situated methodology grounded in the archival practice of (re)collecting, framing vernacular archives as dynamic social agents and sites of affective transmission. Structured as episodic meditations across the moorlands of Brontë Country, the work interrogates how landscape, literature, and the female body intersect through archival gestures including letter writing, re-citing, reciting, remembering, walking, appropriation, and fictionalisation. Drawing on the epistolary form, found materials, and multimodal image-making the artist-researcher is positioned within both the physical terrain and the symbolic archive, enacting an embodied traversal that resists institutional fixity and foregrounds fragment, rupture, and affective resonance (Taylor, 2003; Schneider, 2011; Kämpfe, 2023). The project performs a recuperative act, (re)collecting postcards, letters, voices, and family photographs whilst acknowledging the impossibility of full recovery. Echoing Derrida’s (1996) notion of the archive as search and longing, the archive is conceived not as a fixed repository but as a haunted porous space: a séance, where Brontë, Gaskell, and the artist’s voice (in the guise of fictional personae Phyllis Dare) converge, interrupt, and overwrite each other. This polyphonic layering becomes a strategy of de-archiving, resisting singular authorship and re-situating memory as a shared unstable terrain.
Displacement emerges as both theme and method. The journey to Top Withens, reputed site of Wuthering Heights (1847), is framed as reluctant encounter rather than literary pilgrimage, with the landscape enacting estrangement and resistance (Rosenberg, 2007; Sebald, 2013). Archival materials are (re)collected, redistributed, and misremembered, the gesture of collecting is transformed into a metaphor for unrequited desire. In this way, the archive migrates across bodies, media, and temporalities, a travelling entity whose meaning remains unstable and contested (Bal, 2002, Slaymaker, 2023; Carter et al., 2022). By foregrounding social performances of memory through walking, writing, (re)collecting, remembering, this project proposes a methodology of situated resistance: a way of inhabiting the archive without claiming it. Letters to the Landscape challenges dominant memorial frameworks by expanding how vernacular memory objects are read and activated across non-institutional sites. The project ultimately unfolds as a speculative feminist historiography re-situating memory as a living and embodied terrain. The work has been constructed through the interaction of several pseudonyms, operating under the fictional artist duo Vale & Howlette. By foregrounding these dramatis personae, the project interrogates authorship, authenticity, and the performance of identity within a speculative narrative framework. The use of performance, voice, and multi-modal forms foregrounds how vernacular archives carry social memory in ways that challenge existing interpretative structures, resisting containment through affective rupture. The work ultimately unfolds not to restore a lost narrative or reconstruct a singular past, but to re-situate memory within a living and embodied terrain where archival gestures become vehicles of resistance, resonance, and reimagination and landscapes, bodies and narratives converge.
As new, as current, as now—this is primarily our understanding of technologies and their mediating of our social constructions. But past media and past practices continue to haunt and inflect our present social and technical arrangements. To trace this haunting, two performance theorists and a media theorist engage in this volume with remains and remainders of media cultures through the lenses of theatre and performance studies and of media archaeology. They address the temporalities and materialities of remain(s), the production of obsolescence in relation to the live body, and considerations of cultural memory as well as of infrastructure and the natural history of media culture.
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