Charles Dickens became immensely popular early on in his career as a novelist, and his appeal continues to grow with new editions prompted by recent television and film adaptations, as well as large ...numbers of students studying the Victorian novel. This lively and accessible introduction to Dickens focuses on the extraordinary diversity of his writing. Jon Mee discusses Dickens's novels, journalism and public performances, the historical contexts and his influence on other writers. In the process, five major themes emerge: Dickens the entertainer; Dickens and language; Dickens and London; Dickens, gender, and domesticity; and the question of adaptation, including Dickens's adaptations of his own work. These interrelated concerns allow readers to start making their own new connections between his famous and less widely read works and to appreciate fully the sheer imaginative richness of his writing, which particularly evokes the dizzying expansion of nineteenth-century London.
This book presents an innovative approach to the language of one of the most popular English authors. It illustrates how corpus linguistic methods can be employed to study electronic versions of ...texts by Charles Dickens. With particular focus on Dickens's novels, the book proposes a way into the Dickensian world that starts from linguistic patterns. The analysis begins with clusters, i.e. repeated sequences of words, as pointers to local textual functions. Combining quantitative findings with qualitative analyses, the book takes a fresh view on Dickens's techniques of characterisation, the literary presentation of body language and speech in fiction. The approach brings together corpus linguistics, literary stylistics and Dickens criticism. It thus contributes to bridging the gap between linguistic and literary studies and will be a useful resource for both researchers and students of English language and literature.
The antebellum period has long been identified with the belated emergence of a truly national literature. And yet, as Meredith L. McGill argues, a mass market for books in this period was built and ...sustained through what we would call rampant literary piracy: a national literature developed not despite but because of the systematic copying of foreign works. Restoring a political dimension to accounts of the economic grounds of antebellum literature, McGill unfolds the legal arguments and political struggles that produced an American "culture of reprinting" and held it in place for two crucial decades.In this culture of reprinting, the circulation of print outstripped authorial and editorial control. McGill examines the workings of literary culture within this market, shifting her gaze from first and authorized editions to reprints and piracies, from the form of the book to the intersection of book and periodical publishing, and from a national literature to an internally divided and transatlantic literary marketplace. Through readings of the work of Dickens, Poe, and Hawthorne, McGill seeks both to analyze how changes in the conditions of publication influenced literary form and to measure what was lost as literary markets became centralized and literary culture became stratified in the early 1850s.American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853delineates a distinctive literary culture that was regional in articulation and transnational in scope, while questioning the grounds of the startlingly recent but nonetheless powerful equation of the national interest with the extension of authors' rights.
Taking Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project as an inspiration, Dickens's London offers an exciting and original project that opens a dialogue between phenomenology, philosophy and the Dickensian ...representation of the city in all its forms. Julian Wolfreys suggests that in their representations of London - its streets, buildings, public institutions, domestic residences, rooms and phenomena that constitute such space - Dickens's novels and journalism can be seen as forerunners of urban and material phenomenology. While also addressing those aspects of the urban that are developed from Dickens's interpretations of other literary forms, styles and genres, Dickens's London presents in twenty-six episodes (from Banking and Breakfast via the Insolvent Court, Melancholy and Poverty, to Todgers and Time, Voice and Waking) a radical reorientation to London in the nineteenth century, the development of Dickens as a writer, and the ways in which readers today receive and perceive both.
The body economic Gallagher, Catherine
2006., 20090110, 2009, 2005, 2006-01-01
eBook
The Body Economic revises the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Britain by demonstrating that political economists and the writers who often presented themselves as their literary ...antagonists actually held most of their basic social assumptions in common. Catherine Gallagher demonstrates that political economists and their Romantic and early-Victorian critics jointly relocated the idea of value from the realm of transcendent spirituality to that of organic "life," making human sensations--especially pleasure and pain--the sources and signs of that value. Classical political economy, this book shows, was not a mechanical ideology but a form of nineteenth-century organicism, which put the body and its feelings at the center of its theories, and neoclassical economics built itself even more self-consciously on physiological premises. The Body Economic explains how these shared views of life, death, and sensation helped shape and were modified by the two most important Victorian novelists: Charles Dickens and George Eliot. It reveals how political economists interacted crucially with the life sciences of the nineteenth century--especially with psychophysiology and anthropology--producing the intellectual world that nurtured not only George Eliot's realism but also turn-of-the-century literary modernism.
Dickens' rise to fame and his world-wide popularity were by no means inevitable. He started out with no clear career in mind, drifting in and out of the theatre, journalism and editing before finding ...unexpected success as a creative writer. Taking account of everything known about Dickens' apprentice years, Robert L. Patten narrates the fierce struggle Dickens then had to create an alter ego, Boz, and later to contain and extinguish him. His revision of Dickens' biography in the context of early Victorian social and political history and print culture opens up a more unstable, yet more fascinating, portrait of Dickens. The book tells the story of how Dickens created an authorial persona that highlighted certain attributes and concealed others about his life, talent and publications. This complicated narrative of struggle, determination, dead ends and new beginnings is as gripping as one of Dickens' own novels.
Charles Dickens traveled to North America twice, in 1842 and twenty-five years later in 1867--68, and on both trips Massachusetts was part of his itinerary. Although many aspects of his U.S. travels ...disappointed him, Massachusetts was the one state that met and even exceeded Dickens's expectations for "the republic of his imagination." From the mills of Lowell to the Perkins School for the Blind, it offered an alternate vision of America that influenced his future writings, while the deep and lasting friendships he formed with Bostonians gave him enduring ties to the commonwealth.
This volume provides insight from leading scholars who have begun to reassess the significance of Massachusetts in the author's life and work. The collection begins with a broad biographical and historical overview taken from the full-length narrative of the award-winning exhibition Dickens and Massachusetts: A Tale of Power and Transformation, which attracted thousands of visitors while on display in Lowell. Abundant images from the exhibition, many of them difficult to find elsewhere, enhance the story of Dickens's relationship with the vibrant cultural and intellectual life of Massachusetts. The second section includes essays that consider the importance of Dickens's many connections to the commonwealth.
In addition to the volume editors, contributors include Chelsea Bray, Iain Crawford, Andre DeCuir, Natalie McKnight, Lillian Nayder, and Kit Polga.
As its startling and aggressive title suggests, Dickens Novels as Verse is no standard work of literary criticism. It is, in fact, altogether new and original. Jordan likens the experience of some of ...the great Dickens novels, particularly the later ones (namely, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend) to the experience of lyric verse. The point is not that Dickens novels could ever be mistaken for lyric poems, but that the experience of some of the best of Dickens’s novels, despite their undoubted sprawl, is like the experience of lyric poems—is so because the novels are made up of the same things that make great verse great: intricate, largely unnoticeable tissues of alliteration-like patterning that net across the work and give narratively insignificant coherence to it. Dickens Novels as Verse meticulously describes these book-length patterns in clear, lucid prose. Its three chapters, each focused on a single Dickens novel, are full of close analyses that can be immediately used by teachers, students, and all other readers of Dickens to grasp why Dickens always seems to be a greater writer than the quality of his ideas might lead us to expect.
