Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves

Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves
Author: Malcolm Andrews
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2007-11-29
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0199236208

Charles Dickens's public readings have not had the attention they deserve; and yet Dickens put as much effort into perfecting his performances as he did with his novels. These performances were sensational events and won Dickens thousands of new admirers. This book tells that story and brings the events alive, with more detail than ever before.

The Cambridge Introduction to Charles Dickens

The Cambridge Introduction to Charles Dickens
Author: Jon Mee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2010-09-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139788922

Charles Dickens became immensely popular early on in his career as a novelist, and his appeal continues to grow with new editions prompted by recent television and film adaptations, as well as large numbers of students studying the Victorian novel. This lively and accessible introduction to Dickens focuses on the extraordinary diversity of his writing. Jon Mee discusses Dickens's novels, journalism and public performances, the historical contexts and his influence on other writers. In the process, five major themes emerge: Dickens the entertainer; Dickens and language; Dickens and London; Dickens, gender, and domesticity; and the question of adaptation, including Dickens's adaptations of his own work. These interrelated concerns allow readers to start making their own new connections between his famous and less widely read works and to appreciate fully the sheer imaginative richness of his writing, which particularly evokes the dizzying expansion of nineteenth-century London.

Before George Eliot

Before George Eliot
Author: Fionnuala Dillane
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2013-08-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1107035651

A revisionary study of the impact of Marian Evans's early periodical-press career on her later success as a novelist.

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens
Author: Robert L. Patten
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 848
Release: 2018-09-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191061123

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.

Spectres of the Self

Spectres of the Self
Author: Shane McCorristine
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2010-07-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0521767989

Examines the culture of ghost-seeing, arguing that the ghost represents a symbol of the psychological hauntedness of modern experience.

The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens

The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens
Author: Paul Schlicke
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 705
Release: 2011-11-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0199640181

This anniversary edition of the Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens celebrates 200 years since the birth of one of Britain's most popular authors. Covering his life, his works, his reputation, and his cultural context in over 500 A-Z articles, this is the most reliable and accessible reference work on Dickens available

Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World

Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World
Author: Simon Callow
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2012-08-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0345803248

A short biography of Charles Dickens by acclaimed actor and writer Simon Callow that offers a fresh perspective on one of the greatest novelists in the English language in a lively, highly readable account. "It has all the gusto that a popular biography of Dickens—a man who “could do nothing by halves”—should possess. . . . The best biography for Dickens newcomers and a wonderful read for all."—Library Journal Dickens was one of the first true celebrity authors. Thousands of fans in Britain and America eagerly awaited each new installment of his stories and flocked to see him on his legendary speaking tours. Not only did he create an incredible cast of characters on the page, but he was also a dazzling mimic and storyteller, and he wrote, stage-managed, and acted in plays for the public. Throughout his life, from his childhood performances in pubs to his legendarily powerful reading tours, Dickens was fanatical about the stage. Callow reveals Dickens’s genius on and off the page and offers a compelling insight into a life that was driven as much by performance and showmanship as by literature.

Romanticism and Philosophy

Romanticism and Philosophy
Author: Sophie Laniel-Musitelli
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2015-05-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317617967

This volume brings together a wide range of scholars to offer new perspectives on the relationship between Romanticism and philosophy. The entanglement of Romantic literature with philosophy is increasingly recognized, just as Romanticism is increasingly viewed as European and Transatlantic, yet few studies combine these coordinates and consider the philosophical significance of distinctly literary questions in British and American Romantic writings. The essays in this book are concerned with literary writing as a form of thinking, investigating the many ways in which Romantic literature across the Atlantic engages with European thought, from 18th- and 19th-century philosophy to contemporary theory. The contributors read Romantic texts both as critical responses to the major debates that have shaped the history of philosophy, and as thought experiments in their own right. This volume thus examines anew the poetic philosophy of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Shelley, and Clare, also extending beyond poetry to consider other literary genres as philosophically significant, such as Jane Austen’s novels, De Quincey’s autofiction, Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, or Emerson’s essays. Grounded in complementary theoretical backgrounds and reading practices, the various contributions draw on an impressive array of writers and thinkers and challenge our understanding not only of Romanticism, but also of what we have come to think of as "literature" and "philosophy."

The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens

The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens
Author: Charles Dickens
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 495
Release: 2012-02-02
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0199591415

The nearest we can get to a Dickens autobiography, these letters give us unique insights into his life, and are essential reading for Dickens fans everywhere. Whether you dip in or read straight through, this selection of his letters creates afresh the brilliance of being Dickens, and the sheer pleasure of being in his company.