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.




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 Imagining Himself


Book Description

In Dickens Imagining Himself the author applies biographical materials to analysis of art by examining the way elements in Dicken's life led his imagination to shape his novels. This is a study of how Dickens' self-perceptions guided the patterns of six created worlds at significant points in his life. Contents: What Sort of Consanguinity; Barnaby Rudge: Two Cheers for Maturity; Martin Chuzzlewit: Ambiguously Whittington; David Copperfield: Memory and the Flow of Time; Bleak House: Passing the Bog; Great Expectations: Defining Estella; Our Mutual Friend: Reborn with Galatea; Eclectic Affinities; Notes; Index







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.




Dickens and the Short Story


Book Description

At the height of his career, writing short stories provided Dickens with a release from the formal constraints of his novels and gave free reign to his creative imagination. Ranging from "flights of fancy" to literary masterpieces, Dickens's short stories contained artistic experiments that inspired fuller developments in his novels. Yet the short stories have been all but overlooked in critical discussions. Deborah A. Thomas focuses directly on this body of work, tracing three stages of development. In the early stage until 1840, Dickens produced numerous short stories, culminating in his experience with the abortive Master Humphrey's Clock. In the following ten years, he restricted his writing of short stories to the five Christmas Books but refined his theories about the value of the genre in the context of his work. In the third stage, 1850-1868, Dickens again turned actively to the writing of short stories, many of them the "Christmas Stories" appearing in the weeklies Household Words and All the Year Round, which Dickens edited successively from 1850 to 1869 and from 1859 until his death in 1870. The author concentrates primarily upon the more notable stories, drawing for a perspective upon Dickens' own concept of "fancy." In an increasingly factual age, Dickens—attracted to the unusual and the unknown—found the short story a form in which he could indulge his high degree of fantasy and explore the hidden corners of the mind. Dickens' fascination with psychological abnormality and the supernatural—reflected in his novels—reveals itself even more intriguingly in his short stories. In Thomas's analysis, Dickens' short stories appear as an important key to understanding the novels, while proving worthy in themselves of critical attention. Essential to a thorough study of Dickens, her book sheds light upon previously obscure facets of his developing artistry.




The Imagined World of Charles Dickens


Book Description




Dickens's Style


Book Description

Charles Dickens, generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian age, was known as 'The Inimitable', not least for his distinctive style of writing. This collection of twelve essays addresses the essential but often overlooked subject of Dickens's style, with each essay discussing a particular feature of his writing. All the essays consider Dickens's style conceptually, and they read it closely, demonstrating the ways it works on particular occasions. They show that style is not simply an aesthetic quality isolated from the deepest meanings of Dickens's fiction, but that it is inextricably involved with all kinds of historical, political and ideological concerns. Written in a lively and accessible manner by leading Dickens scholars, the collection ranges across all Dickens's writing, including the novels, journalism and letters.




Original Copy


Book Description

'"Originality" is only plagiarizing from a great many', remarked Rupert Brooke, stealing the line from Voltaire. Questions of originality, and accusations of plagiarism, are as old as literature, but different literary cultures have interpreted the relationship between originality and plagiarism in startlingly dissimilar ways. Original Copy investigates and documents the drastic reappraisal of literary originality and plagiarism which occurred over the course of the nineteenth century: from the heroic visions of original authorship that characterised the 1820s and 1830s, through to the stickle-brick creativity of Oscar Wilde and Lionel Johnson at the century's end. It reveals how ideas of originality and plagiarism were not only a theoretical concern of Victorian commentators on literature, but also provided many important Victorian writers - Eliot, Dickens, Reade, Pater, Wilde, and Lionel Johnson among them - with a creative resource. Moving between numerous different fields of thought and knowledge - literary criticism, the history of science, manuscript culture, anthropology - and written in a supple and elegant style, this book shows that the ideas of originality and plagiarism were the subjects of nineteenth-century literature, as well as what it was subject to.




When It Rained at Hembry Castle


Book Description

A lush historical novel set in Victorian England, When It Rained at Hembry Castle is the story of an aristocratic family, secrets that dare not be told, and the wonder of falling in love. When the 8th Earl of Staton dies, his eldest son, the unreliable Richard, inherits the title and the family’s home—Hembry Castle. The Earl’s niece, the American-born Daphne, is intrigued by Edward Ellis, a rising author with a first-hand knowledge of Hembry Castle—from the servants’ hall. Can Richard come to terms with his title before bringing ruin on his family? Will Edward and Daphne find their way to each other despite the obstacles of life at Hembry Castle? When It Rained at Hembry Castle is a page-turning, romantic novel with vivid characters and an engrossing story that will keep you guessing until the end.