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: That the idea of Dickens and the adjective 'Dickensian' continue to have a cultural resonance which extends beyond the book-buying public almost two centuries after Dickens's birth is testimony to his sense of himself as a mass cultural artist...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: The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture is a major contribution to the dynamic field of Victorian studies. This collection of 37 original chapters by leading international Victorian scholars offers new approaches to familiar themes, including science, religion, and gender, and gives space to newer and emerging topics, including old age, fair play, and economics...read more

Product Description: What did reading mean to the Victorians? This question is the key point of departure for Reading and the Victorians, an examination of the era when reading underwent a swifter and more radical transformation than at any other moment in history...read more

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)