Abstract
ABSTRACT This article revisits Emily Brontë’s legacy in Caryl Phillips’s postcolonial adaptation of Wuthering Heights. His 2015 novel The Lost Child is a modern tale of migration and unbelonging offering an intertextual dialogue with Brontë’s masterpiece by re-imagining Heathcliff’s prehistory and connecting his outcastness with the multicultural realities of post-Windrush Britain. Through his conjuring-up of Brontë’s “unquiet slumbers”, Phillips both addresses the melancholic subjectivities of the Victorian text and pre-text and relates them to those of the modern text. In its analysis the article draws on the postcolonial expansion of the notion of melancholia as theorized by Paul Gilroy, Anne A. Cheng, and Craig A. Smith. It eventually explores how the novel’s emphasis on orphanhood and lostness is counteracted by Phillips’s appeal to literary “maternity”, since, against other patrilineal models of (af)filiation, it is mainly through female precursors that he confronts an intricate literary inheritance.
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