Dickens and Imagination


Book Description

"A work which all 19th-century scholars will find useful and which Dickens scholars will find indispensable."--Edwin M. Eigner, University of California at Riverside Robert Higbie investigates the concept and use of imagination in Romantic and Victorian literature, concentrating on the novels of Charles Dickens and showing how they illuminate and are influenced by various tendencies in post-Romantic thought. Higbie offers a new definition of imagination as a function of desire, an unstable compound existing "at the intersection of reason and desire," and he discusses the way 19th-century writers attempted to use imagination to revive or replace religious belief. Against this background he discusses Dickens's works from Pickwick to Our Mutual Friend, showing that both an idealist emphasis on imagination and a realist distrust of it evolved in complex ways throughout Dickens's career. He argues that Dickens's novels involve a search for some sort of spiritual ideal and that he based that search on imagination. At the same time, Dickens recognized the limitations of imagination and attempted to transform it through the process enacted in his novels. During a period when criticism has been dominated by ideological orthodoxy, Higbie does not impose modern, quasi-political attitudes on his subject but rather accepts the past sympathetically on its own terms. His work is refreshingly free of jargon and offers an alternate way of thinking about literature and the creative process. Robert Higbie, professor of English at Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina, is the author of Character and Structure in the English Novel (UPF, 1984) as well as numerous articles on 19th-century British literature.




The Value of Imagination


Book Description

A biography of the nineteenth-century English novelist, Charles Dickens, emphasizing the value of an imaginative mind.




The Imagination of Charles Dickens (RLE Dickens)


Book Description

This book describes Charles Dickens as an ordinary man who by being perfectly tuned to the public taste developed into a master of his art. The clue to this paradox lies, in the author’s opinion, in Dickens’ obsession with such topics as money, crowds and prisons which touch the life of everyone. From the deep fears of his childhood they became the main food for his imagination. As his creative mind worried over them, so his art developed. This process provided the driving force behind his work, and is at the root of his greatness as an artist.







Hard Times


Book Description




Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination


Book Description

Sally Ledger offers substantial readings of the influences of radical writers on works from Pickwick to Little Dorrit.







The Dog in the Dickensian Imagination


Book Description

Fascinated by them, unable to ignore them, and imaginatively stimulated by them, Charles Dickens was an acute and unsentimental reporter on the dogs he kept and encountered during a time when they were a burgeoning part of the nineteenth-century urban and domestic scene. As dogs inhabited Dickens’s city, so too did they populate his fiction, journalism, and letters. In the first book-length work of criticism on Dickens’s relationship to canines, Beryl Gray shows that dogs, real and invented, were intrinsic to Dickens’s vision and experience of London and to his representations of its life. Gray draws on an array of reminiscences by Dickens’s friends, family, and fellow writers, and also situates her book within the context of nineteenth-century attitudes towards dogs as revealed in the periodical press, newspapers, and institutional archives. Integral to her study is her analysis of Dickens’s texts in relationship to their illustrations by George Cruikshank and Hablot Knight Browne and to portraiture by late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists like Thomas Gainsborough and Edwin Landseer. The Dog in the Dickensian Imagination will not only enlighten readers and critics of Dickens and those interested in his life but will serve as an important resource for scholars interested in the Victorian city, the treatment of animals in literature and art, and attitudes towards animals in nineteenth-century Britain.




Dickens's Idiomatic Imagination


Book Description

Dickens's Idiomatic Imagination offers an original analysis of how Charles Dickens's use of "low" and "slangular" (his neologism) language allowed him to express and develop his most sophisticated ideas. Using a hybrid of digital (distant) and analogue (close) reading methodologies, Peter J. Capuano considers Dickens's use of bodily idioms—"right-hand man," "shoulder to the wheel," "nose to the grindstone"—against the broader lexical backdrop of the nineteenth century. Dickens was famously drawn to the vernacular language of London's streets, but this book is the first to call attention to how he employed phrases that embody actions, ideas, and social relations for specific narrative and thematic purposes. Focusing on the mid- to late career novels Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, Capuano demonstrates how Dickens came to relish using common idioms in uncommon ways and the possibilities they opened up for artistic expression. Dickens's Idiomatic Imagination establishes a unique framework within the social history of language alteration in nineteenth-century Britain for rethinking Dickens's literary trajectory and its impact on the vocabularies of generations of novelists, critics, and speakers of English.




Dickens and the Trials of Imagination


Book Description

Stewart investigates the fanciful impulse among Dickens's characters, their exchange of semblance for reality, their use of the imagination as a means of retaliating against the fallen Dickensian world.