Bloom's Modern Critical Views - Charles Dickens (2006) (293p) [Inua].pdf

Charles Dickens (Bloom's Modern Critical Views) Hardcover – July, 2006
by Harold Bloom (Editor)

Series: Bloom's Modern Critical Views
Hardcover: 284 pages
Publisher: Chelsea House Pub (L); Updated edition (July 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0791085686
ISBN-13: 978-0791085684

- Brings together the best criticism on the most widely read poets, novelists, and playwrights- Presents complex critical portraits of the most influential writers in the English-speaking world--from the English medievalists to contemporary writers- Introductory essay by Harold Bloom

Editor’s Note:
My Introduction centers upon Dickens’s staging of the will in David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, and A Tale of Two Cities.
G.K. Chesterton, to me still the best of Dickens’s critics, emphasizes the novelist’s extraordinary contemporary popularity, which continues until this day.
For George Orwell, Dickens was an implicit radical and a humane liberal, of a kind now virtually extinct.
Great Expectations is praised as Dickens’s best story by George Bernard Shaw, while Lionel Trilling praises Little Dorrit as a triumph of fantasy.
Dickens’s heroines and heroes are regarded by Angus Wilson with an exuberant ambivalence, after which William Oddie exalts Mr. Micawber as a humorous creation so powerful as to wrest David Copperfield away from its autobiographical hero.
Violence in Dickens is seen by John Carey as aesthetically effective only where it is extreme, while Bleak House, Dickens’s authentic masterpiece, is analyzed by D.A. Miller as an intricate representation of “discipline in different voices,” with a particular emphasis upon Dickens’s juxtaposed visions of the police and the family.
George Levine usefully contrasts Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens, after which Our Mutual Friend is read by Pam Morris as a virtual national apocalypse.
Garrett Stewart finds Dickens’s relation to language to be one that “frays the very assurances it seems to bind,” while John Cosnett details the remarkably acute Dickensian observations of neurological morbidities.
My Afterthought attempts a brief general overview of Dickens’s perpetual relevance.