John O. Jordan

Presents a guide to Jane Austen's work in the context of her contemporary world

The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen

Jordan John O.

The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens offers a valuable introduction to Dickens for students and general readers.

The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens

Carol T. Christ

Nineteenth-century British culture frequently represented the eye as the preeminent organ of truth. These essays explore the relationship between the verbal and the visual in the Victorian imagination. They range broadly over topics that include the relationship of optical devices to the visual imagination, the role of photography in changing the conception of evidence and truth, the changing partnership between illustrator and novelist, and the ways in which literary texts represent the visual. Together they begin to construct a history of seeing in the Victorian period. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.

Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination

Catherine Waters

Robert L. Patten

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.

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens

This collection of essays examines cultural and literary issues in nineteenth-century book production and circulation.

Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices

Literature in the Marketplace

"Looks freshly at facts that have remained marginal to most critics' sense of the literature--the sheer mechanism of artistic and literary reproductions. These essays make an unusual, various, and interesting collection, with appeal to a great many constituencies."--George Levine, author of Darwin and the Novelists "This is an exciting collection linked by a series of contemporary critical assumptions and Victorian concerns. . . . For all their reconsideration of theory, the essays are written in a lively, jargon-free style that should give them popular as well as scholarly appeal."--Carole Silver, coeditor of Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris

Gordon Bigelow

Bleak House provides students and teachers occasion to discuss Victorian social concerns involving law, crime, family, education, and money and to learn about every stratum of English society, from the aristocracy to the homeless. The essays in this volume offer instructors an array of practical strategies for use in the classroom: some describe courses organised exclusively around Bleak House; others offer ideas for teaching a single scene or topic in the novel.

Approaches to Teaching Dickens's Bleak House

Supposing "Bleak House" is an extended meditation on what many consider to be Dickens’s and nineteenth-century England’s greatest work of narrative fiction. Focusing on the novel’s retrospective narrator, whom he identifies as Esther Woodcourt in order to distinguish her from her younger, unmarried self, John Jordan offers provocative new readings of the novel’s narrative structure, its illustrations, its multiple and indeterminate endings, the role of its famous detective, Inspector Bucket, its many ghosts, and its relation to key events in Dickens’s life during the years 1850 to 1853. Jordan draws on insights from narratology and psychoanalysis in order to explore multiple dimensions of Esther’s complex subjectivity and fractured narrative voice. His conclusion considers Bleak House as a national allegory, situating it in the context of the troubled decade of the 1840s and in relation to Dickens’s seldom-studied A Child’s History of England (written during the same years as his great novel) and to Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Supposing "Bleak House" claims Dickens as a powerful investigator of the unconscious mind and as a "popular" novelist deeply committed to social justice and a politics of inclusiveness. Victorian Literature and Culture Series

John O. Jordan

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