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Author: Claire Wood Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1107098637 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 243
Book Description
The first ever full-length study exploring how Dickens's fiction engaged with, responded to, and even exploited Victorian attitudes to death.
Author: Claire Wood Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1107098637 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 243
Book Description
The first ever full-length study exploring how Dickens's fiction engaged with, responded to, and even exploited Victorian attitudes to death.
Author: Claire Wood Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1316241211 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 243
Book Description
Charles Dickens is famous for his deathbed scenes, but these have rarely been examined within the context of his ambivalence towards the Victorian commodification of death. Dickens repeatedly criticised ostentatious funeral and mourning customs, and asserted the harmful consequences of treating the corpse as an object of speculation rather than sympathy. At the same time, he was fascinated by those who made a living from death and recognised that his authorial profits implicated him in the same trade. This book explores how Dickens turned mortality into the stuff of life and art as he navigated a thriving culture of death-based consumption. It surveys the diverse ways in which death became a business, from body-snatching, undertaking, and joint-stock cemetery companies, to the telling and selling of stories. This broad study offers fresh perspectives on death in The Old Curiosity Shop and Our Mutual Friend, and discusses lesser-known works and textual illustrations.
Author: John Leigh Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674504380 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 347
Book Description
Many of the West’s best writers fought in duels or wrote about them, seduced by glamour or risk or recklessness. A gift as a plot device, the duel also offered a way to discover how we face fears of humiliation, pain, and death. John Leigh’s literary history of the duel illuminates these and other tensions attending the birth of the modern world.
Author: Heather Redmond Publisher: Kensington Books ISBN: 1496717201 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
In this clever reimagining of Charles Dickens’s life, he and fiancée Kate Hogarth must solve the murder of an old miser, just before Christmas . . . London, December 1835: Charles and Kate are out with friends and family for a chilly night of caroling and good cheer. But their blood truly runs cold when their singing is interrupted by a body plummeting from an upper window of a house. They soon learn the dead man, his neck strangely wrapped in chains, is Jacob Harley, the business partner of the resident of the house, an unpleasant codger who owns a counting house, one Emmanuel Screws. Ever the journalist, Charles dedicates himself to discovering who's behind the diabolical defenestration. But before he can investigate further, Harley's corpse is stolen. Following that, Charles is visited in his quarters by what appears to be Harley's ghost—or is it merely Charles’s overwrought imagination? He continues to suspect Emmanuel, the same penurious penny pincher who denied his father a loan years ago, but Kate insists the old man is too weak to heave a body out a window. Their mutual affection and admiration can accommodate a difference of opinion, but matters are complicated by the unexpected arrival of an infant orphan. Charles must find the child a home while solving a murder, to ensure that the next one in chains is the guilty party . . . Praise for the Dickens of a Crime Mysteries! “Mystery fans and history buffs alike should cheer.” —KirkusSTARRED Review “Sharp, incisive, and delightfully twisty. I’m sure I won't be the only reader exclaiming, ‘What the Dickens?!’” —Anna Lee Huber, bestselling author. “As easy to read as one of Mr. Dickens’ actual novels and as entertaining.” —New York Journal of Books “Fans of Anne Perry will love this one.” —Dianne Freeman, award–winning author
Author: Charles Dickens Publisher: ISBN: Category : English fiction Languages : en Pages : 564
Book Description
Paul Dombey is a cold, unbending, pompous merchant, and a widower with two children - Paul and Florence. His chief ambition is to perpetuate the firm-name. He dreams of passing his business on to his son. Dombey dotes on his son, and neglects and mistreats his daughter.The "son" in the title of the book is incapable of ever joining the firm. A sickly and odd child, Paul dies at the age of six. Dombey pours his resentment and anger out on his daughter, whom he pushes away despite her efforts to earn her father's love.Eventually Dombey remarries, after literally acquiring his new wife from her father in a commercial transaction. Dombey is as bad a husband as he is a father and his marriage is loveless. His new bride hates Dombey and eventually runs off with Canker, his business manager. Dombey characteristically blames Florence for this reversal, and strikes her, causing Florence to run away as well.Abandoned by everyone, Dombey loses his business and goes half insane, living in his decaying house. Dombey is eventually reconciled to his daughter, who always a doormat forgives her father........
Author: Robert L. Patten Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 019267711X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 369
Book Description
"Marley was dead, to begin with." Why does the most beloved of Christmas books open with a death? What has death to do with Christmas and New Years, and with Dickens's Christmas books and stories over his entire life? This book starts at the Paris Morgue and takes Dickens through his Christmas experiences from childhood and beyond, his celebrations of the season, and the sorrows that he often reviews in the New Year. Robert L. Patten weaves together Dickens's life, career, writings, journalism, travel, theatrical presentations, and religious convictions to offer a richly designed and entertaining narrative, fulsomely illustrated, of the manifold ways Dickens figures the spirit and traditions of the winter holidays in Victorian England. Both the gothic of ghosts and retribution and what he saw as the grotesque of lower-class enjoyment surface importantly in Dickens's fantasies. This volume discloses many hitherto overlooked connections between Dickens's writings and life and arrives at some surprising conclusions about Dickens's imagination, understanding of the conditions and meaning of Christian life, and the failures of British society to meet the pressing needs of its people. Not only does it address the public reception of these writings; it also tracks the responses and understandings of Dickens's illustrators, friends who found novel ways of telling, and mis-telling, the stories.
Author: Anne Perry Publisher: Berkley Hardcover ISBN: Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 296
Book Description
In the pages of his novels, Charles Dickens railed against injustice in all its forms -- the miserliness of Ebenezer Scrooge, the indifference of the aristocracy, the cruelty of Fagin. He captured the bitter unfairness of the class system and the violence that erupted between rich and poor. Now, today's masters of mystery "decrease the surplus population" with these new stories inspired by Dickens and his immortal classics. Three spirits visit a modern-day Scrooge to save his soul -- and solve a murder -- in Carole Nelson Douglas's "The Holly and the Ivy"...Dickens himself teams up with fellow novelist Wilkie Collins to investigate a grisly death in Peter Tremayne's "The Passing Shadow"...Samuel Pickwick poses as a sentry over a grave in "Mr. Pickwick vs. the Body Snatchers" by Bill Crider...Agatha Award-winner Marcia Talley offers an alternate ending to Great Expectations in "Miss Havisham Regrets"...Brendan DuBois unleashes "Fagin's Revenge" by revealing the secrets within the pages of the original manuscript of Oliver Twist...New York Times bestselling author Anne Perry presents "A Tale of One City" in which our hero Sydney Carton must save an innocent woman from the guillotine...and Lillian Stewart Carl, P. N. Elrod, Martin Edwards, Carolyn Wheat, and Gillian Linscott all pay homage to the author who spoke to the masses about the human quest for justice -- with an imaginative collection of tales that ask, "Who the Dickens done it?" Book jacket.
Author: Robert L. Patten Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0191061123 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 848
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.
Author: A.N. Wilson Publisher: HarperCollins ISBN: 0062954962 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 343
Book Description
Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best Biography A lively and insightful biographical celebration of the imaginative genius of Charles Dickens, published in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of his death. Charles Dickens was a superb public performer, a great orator and one of the most famous of the Eminent Victorians. Slight of build, with a frenzied, hyper-energetic personality, Dickens looked much older than his fifty-eight years when he died—an occasion marked by a crowded funeral at Westminster Abbey, despite his waking wishes for a small affair. Experiencing the worst and best of life during the Victorian Age, Dickens was not merely the conduit through whom some of the most beloved characters in literature came into the world. He was one of them. Filled with the twists, pathos, and unusual characters that sprang from this novelist’s extraordinary imagination, The Mystery of Charles Dickens looks back from the legendary writer’s death to recall the key events in his life. In doing so, he seeks to understand Dickens’ creative genius and enduring popularity. Following his life from cradle to grave, it becomes clear that Dickens’s fiction drew from his life—a fact he acknowledged. Like Oliver Twist, Dickens suffered a wretched childhood, then grew up to become not only a respectable gentleman but an artist of prodigious popularity. Dickens knew firsthand the poverty and pain his characters endured, including the scandal of a failed marriage. Going beyond standard narrative biography, A. N. Wilson brilliantly revisits the wellspring of Dickens’s vast and wild imagination, to reveal at long last why his novels captured the hearts of nineteenth century readers—and why they continue to resonate today. The Mystery of Charles Dickens is illustrated with 30 black-and-white images.
Author: Claire Wood
Author: Claire Wood
Author: Claire Wood
Author: John Leigh
Author: Heather Redmond
Author: Charles Dickens
Author: Robert L. Patten
Author: Anne Perry
Author: Robert L. Patten
Author: Richard Anthony Proctor
Author: A.N. Wilson