Dickens's Style

Daniel Tyler

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781107028432
• eBook ISBN:
  9781107240438
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Charles Dickens, generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian age, was known as 'The Inimitable', not least for his distinctive style of writing. This collection of twelve essays addresses the essential but often overlooked subject of Dickens's style, with each essay discussing a particular feature of his writing. All the essays consider Dickens's style conceptually, and they read it closely, demonstrating the ways it works on particular occasions. They show that style is not simply an aesthetic quality isolated from the deepest meanings of Dickens's fiction, but that it is inextricably involved with all kinds of historical, political and ideological concerns. Written in a lively and accessible manner by leading Dickens scholars, the collection ranges across all Dickens's writing, including the novels, journalism and letters.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dickens’s Style
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Editions and abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter One Dickens’s umbrellas
• Chapter Two Dickens by the clock
• Chapter Three Dickens’s rhythms
• Chapter Four Spectres of style
• Chapter Five Dickens and the form of the historical present
• Chapter Six ‘Gigantic domesticity’: the exaggeration of Charles Dickens
• Chapter Seven Style and the making of character in Dickens
• Chapter Eight Snarling Charles: a Saxon style of restraint
• Chapter Nine Compound interest: Dickens’s figurative style
• Chapter Ten Reading the book of himself: The Uncommercial Traveller and ‘Dickensian’ style
• Chapter Eleven Lived death: Dickens’s rogue glyphs
• Chapter Twelve Dispensing with style
• Select bibliography
• Index
• Series