Product Description: The scale of the 2012 bicentenary celebrations of Dickens's birth is testimony to his status as one of the most globally popular literary authors the world has ever seen. Yet Dickens has also become associated in the public imagination with a particular version of the Victorian past and with respectability...read more

Containing extensive introductory comment on the contexts, critical history and interpretations of Oliver Twist, this comprehensive guide explores the wealth of contextual and critical that surrounds Dickens' text.

Product Description: Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist is one of the most significant novels of the Victorian era and having been adapted for both stage and screen, retains its impact in the cultural consciousness of many nations. Taking the form of a sourcebook, this guide to Dickens’ novel includes: extensive introductory comment on the contexts, critical history and interpretations of the text, from publication to the present annotated extracts from key contextual documents, reviews, critical works and the text itself cross-references between documents and sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism suggestions for further reading...read more

Product Description: This is the first major study of Dickens's villains. They embody, John argues, the crucial fusion between the "deviant" and "theatrical" aspects of his writing. Though there have been many studies of both the macabre and the dramatic Dickens, this book sets up a dialogue between these two main strands and suggests a new way understanding the cultural and political implications of his melodramatic aesthetics...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This collection focuses on novels and essays from the beginning of Victoria's reign through to the end of the 19th century and into our own times. The essays represent a wide range of critical and theoretical viewpoints on fiction, and they deal with a number of lesser-known Victorian works as well as with some of the most canonical texts of the period...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: At the cusp of literary and cultural studies, this wide-ranging critical anthology reevaluates Victorian culture in the light of the literature of the period and vice versa. Also, essays by eminent and emerging Victorianists offer a reassessment, explicit and implicit, of Victorian studies and its methodologies...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)