Charles Dickens's Great Expectations

A Cultural Life, 1860–2012

Mary Hammond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317168249
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Great Expectations has had a long, active and sometimes surprising life since its first serialized appearance in All the Year Round between 1 December 1860 and 3 August 1861. In this new publishing and reception history, Mary Hammond demonstrates that while Dickens's thirteenth novel can tell us a great deal about the dynamic mid-Victorian moment into which it was born, its afterlife beyond the nineteenth-century Anglophone world reveals the full extent of its versatility. Re-assessing generations of Dickens scholarship and using newly discovered archival material, Hammond covers the formative history of Great Expectations' early years, analyses the extent and significance of its global reach, and explores the ways in which it has functioned as literature and stage, TV, film and radio drama from its first appearance to the latest film version of 2012. Appendices include contemporary reviews and comprehensive bibliographies of adaptations and translations. The book is a rich resource for scholars and students of Dickens; of comparative literature; and of publishing, readership, and media history.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Entry of a New Novel into the Western World, 1860–1870
• 2 Afterlife in the West, 1870–1900
• 3 Great Expectations in the New Media Age, 1900–1945
• 4 The Entrenchment of a ‘Classic’, 1946–2000
• 5 Translating Great Expectations, 1860–2012
• Coda
• Appendix A: Select List of British and American Volume Editions of Great Expectations, 1861–1939
• Appendix B: List of Translations, 1861–2012
• Appendix C: Adaptations for Stage, Radio, Film and Television, 1861–2012
• Appendix D: Contemporary British and American Reviews
• Bibliography
• Index