Charles Dickens: "Great Expectations" (Icon Critical Guides) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1840460202 ISBN 13: 9781840460209

Publisher: Icon Books, 1998

Synopsis

Charles Dickens is the most famous and popular English author of the 19th century, and "Great Expectations" is often regarded as his finest work. The dramatic story of Pip's journey from high hopes to devastating disappointment offers profound insights into Victorian society and into the workings of human desire. In this guide, Nicolas Tredell introduces and sets in context the key debates about a novel which has provoked an immensely rich critical response. The extracts and essays included here examine "Great Expectations" in structural, symbolic, political, psychological, social and sexual terms, relating it to its own time and to a range of 20th century critical and theoretical perspectives.

About this title

Review

I continue to find the Readers' Guides indispensable for teaching - they really give students a sense of criticism having a history' - Professor Rachel Bowlby, University of York

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From the Back Cover

At last available in a single volume: comprehensive overviews and concise analyses of the key critical texts and approaches to the most-studied works of literature. By assembling extracts from essays, reviews, and articles, the columbia critical guides provide students with ready access to the most important secondary writings on a single text or pair of texts by a given writer.

each volume:
-- Offers a balanced and nuanced approach to criticism, drawing on a wide array of British and American sources -- Explains criticism in terms of key approaches, allowing students to grasp the central issues for each work -- Is edited by a noted scholar who specializes in the writer or work in question -- Includes notes and a comprehensive bibliography and index.

The extracts and essays included here examine great expectations in structural, symbolic, social, political, psychological, and sexual terms, relating the novel to its own time and to a range of twentieth-century theoretical perspectives. Exploring secondary sources, from initial reviews in the 1860s to the most up-to-date critiques of the 1990s, the guide is an essential resource for the study of one of Dickens's most complex works.

Edition details

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1840460202
• ISBN 13: 9781840460209
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192
• Editor: Tredell Nicolas