Dickens and Heredity

Dickens and Heredity PDF Author: G. Morgentaler
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230596320
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Get Book Here

Book Description
Despite the modern obsession with genetics and reproductive technology, very little has been written about Dickens's fascination with heredity, nor the impact that this fascination had on his novels . Dickens and Heredity is an attempt to rectify that omission by describing the hereditary theories that were current in Dickens's time and how these are reflected in his fiction. The book also argues that Dickens jettisoned his earlier belief in the prescriptive and deterministic potential of heredity after Darwin published The Origin of the Species in 1859.

Dickens and Heredity

Dickens and Heredity PDF Author: G. Morgentaler
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230596320
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Get Book Here

Book Description
Despite the modern obsession with genetics and reproductive technology, very little has been written about Dickens's fascination with heredity, nor the impact that this fascination had on his novels . Dickens and Heredity is an attempt to rectify that omission by describing the hereditary theories that were current in Dickens's time and how these are reflected in his fiction. The book also argues that Dickens jettisoned his earlier belief in the prescriptive and deterministic potential of heredity after Darwin published The Origin of the Species in 1859.

Charles Dickens and the Sciences of Childhood

Charles Dickens and the Sciences of Childhood PDF Author: K. Boehm
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137362502
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book takes a fresh look at childhood in Dickens' works and in Victorian science and culture more generally. It offers a new way of understanding Dickens' interest in childhood by showing how his fascination with new scientific ideas about childhood and practices of scientific inquiry shaped his narrative techniques and aesthetic imagination.

The Dickens Industry

The Dickens Industry PDF Author: Laurence W. Mazzeno
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 9781571133175
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Get Book Here

Book Description
Undoubtedly the best-selling author of his day and well loved by readers in succeeding generations, Charles Dickens was not always a favorite among critics. Celebrated for his novels advocating social reform, for half a century after his death he was ridiculed by those academics who condescended to write about him. Only the faithful band of devotees who called themselves Dickensians kept alive an interest in his work. Then, during the Second World War, he was resurrected by critics, and was soon being hailed as the foremost writer of his age, a literary genius alongside Shakespeare and Milton. More recently, Dickens has again been taken to task by a new breed of literary theorists who fault his chauvinism and imperialist attitudes. Whether he has been adored or despised, however, one thing is certain: no other Victorian novelist has generated more critical commentary. This book traces Dickens's reputation from the earliest reviews through the work of early 21st-century commentators, showing how judgments of Dickens changed with new standards for evaluating fiction. Mazzeno balances attention to prominent critics from the late 19th century through the first three quarters of the 20th with an emphasis on the past three decades, during which literary theory has opened up new ways of reading Dickens. What becomes clear is that, in attempting to provide fresh insight into Dickens's writings, critics often reveal as much about the predilections of their own age as they do about the novelist. Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University, Reading, Pennsylvania.

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens PDF Author: Robert L. Patten
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191061115
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 865

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens is a comprehensive and up-to-date collection on Dickens's life and works. It includes original chapters on all of Dickens's writing and new considerations of his contexts, from the social, political, and economic to the scientific, commercial, and religious. The contributions speak in new ways about his depictions of families, environmental degradation, and improvements of the industrial age, as well as the law, charity, and communications. His treatment of gender, his mastery of prose in all its varieties and genres, and his range of affects and dramatization all come under stimulating reconsideration. His understanding of British history, of empire and colonization, of his own nation and foreign ones, and of selfhood and otherness, like all the other topics, is explained in terms easy to comprehend and profoundly relevant to global modernity.

Reading Adoption

Reading Adoption PDF Author: Marianne Novy
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472115075
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Get Book Here

Book Description
A literary scholar who is an adult adoptee delves into one of the enduring themes of literature--the child raised by other parents

Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities PDF Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 0791092933
Category : Dickens, Charles
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Get Book Here

Book Description
A study guide to Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities," featuring a biographical sketch of the author, a list of characters, summary and analysis, and a selection of critical views.

Dickens's Great Expectations

Dickens's Great Expectations PDF Author: Jerome Meckier
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813185289
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 409

Get Book Here

Book Description
Dickens scholar Jerome Meckier's acclaimed Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction examined fierce literary competition between leading novelists who tried to establish their credentials as realists by rewriting Dickens's novels. Here, Meckier argues that in Great Expectations, Dickens not only updated David Copperfield but also rewrote novels by Lever, Thackeray, Collins, Shelley, and Charlotte and Emily Brontë. He periodically revised his competitors' themes, characters, and incidents to discredit their novels as unrealistic fairy tales imbued with Cinderella motifs. Dickens darkened his fairy tale perspective by replacing Cinderella with the story of Misnar's collapsible pavilion from The Tales of the Genii (a popular, pseudo-oriental collection). The Misnar analogue supplied a corrective for the era's Cinderella complex, a warning to both Haves and Have-nots, and a basis for Dickens's tragicomic view of the world.

Charles Dickens's Great Expectations

Charles Dickens's Great Expectations PDF Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 0791081680
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 121

Get Book Here

Book Description
Presents an overview of the novel, featuring a biographical sketch of the English author, a list of characters, a summary of the plot, and critical and analytical views of the work.

Dickens and Childhood

Dickens and Childhood PDF Author: Laura Peters
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351944533
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 595

Get Book Here

Book Description
'No words can express the secret agony of my soul'. Dickens's tantalising hint alluding to his time at Warren's Blacking Factory remains a gnomic statement until Forster's biography after Dickens's death. Such a revelation partly explains the dominance of biography in early Dickens criticism; Dickens's own childhood was understood to provide the material for his writing, particularly his representation of the child and childhood. Yet childhood in Dickens continues to generate a significant level of critical interest. This volume of essays traces the shifting importance given to childhood in Dickens criticism. The essays consider a range of subjects such as the Romantic child, the child and the family, and the child as a vehicle for social criticism, as well as current issues such as empire, race and difference, and death. Written by leading researchers and educators, this selection of previously published articles and book chapters is representative of key developments in this field. Given the perennial importance of the child in Dickens this volume is an indispensable reference work for Dickens specialists and aficionados alike.

Victorian Soundscapes

Victorian Soundscapes PDF Author: John M. Picker
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780195151916
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book Here

Book Description
Far from the hushed restraint we associate with the Victorians their world pulsated with sound. This book shows how, in more ways than one, Victorians were hearing things. John Picker draws upon literary and scientific works to recapture the Victorian sense of aural discovery.