Other Dickens: Pickwick to ChuzzlewitIn the first half of his career, Dickens wrote some of the most important novels of the nineteenth century, including The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Martin Chuzzlewit. They are exorbitant and transgressive books, with an inventive comic force unprecedented in the English novel. In this, the first full-length study for thirty years, John Bowen blends contemporary theory and historical awareness to argue that they are radical in both political and fictional terms. With a tactful use of contemporary critical theory, he shows how their often uncanny power disturbs and transforms our ways of understanding Dickens's work and his place in the history of the novel. |
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absurd allegory Barnaby Rudge called Cambridge chapter characters Charles Dickens child comic Critical dead death desire Dick Dickens London Dickens's writing domestic Dotheboys dreams economic father fiction figure Forster Freud G. K. Chesterton Gamp George ghosts Harmondsworth haunted Hillis Miller historical novel human Ibid Jacques Derrida John language later letter literary Literature living Mantalini Martin Chuzzlewit Marx Master Humphrey's Clock matter Michael Slater moral mourning Mudfog Nadgett Nancy Nancy's narrative narrator nature Nell's never Nicholas Nickleby Old Curiosity Old Curiosity Shop Oliver Twist Oliver's Oxford passage Pecksniff Penguin Pickwick Papers Pickwick to Dombey Pilgrim plot political preface radical Ralph readers reading repetition rhetoric Routledge Sam Weller scene seems sense sexual Sikes Smike social speech Squeers Steven Marcus story strange Tapley Tappertit tells things Tigg tion tropes truth uncanny University Press Varden Victorian Weller Willet word young