- Paperback: 256 pages
- Publisher: OUP Oxford (10 April 2003)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0192840487
- ISBN-13: 978-0192840486
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.8 x 1.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 757,118 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Description
Product Description
Authors in Context examines the work of major authors in relation to their own times and to the present day. Combining history with lively literary discussion, each volume provides comprehensive insight into texts in their context. Charles Dickens was both a representative Victorian and an artist who is quintessentially a 'Post-Romantic'. He was the most popular author of his age and the one who most vividly reflected the contradictory impulses of Victorian society, its energy and invention as much as its social and political anomalies. This book explores Dickens's interest in the urban phenomenon which so marks nineteenth-century culture, and it looks at the vital interconnection between his life and his art. Like his character, David Copperfield, Dickens lived his life and pursued his career 'thoroughly in earnest', but he was also a great comic writer whose work resonates well beyond his own age and continues to be recontextualized on the stage, on film, and on television.
About the Author
Andrew Sanders has edited David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities for OWC. He is the author of Dickens and the Spirit of the Age (1999) and The Short Oxford History of English Literature (1994, 2000). He was formerly Editor of The Dickensian.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
ON 10 February 1812 Charles Dickens's father, John Dickens, proudly, and more than a little pompously, announced the birth of his son three days earlier: BIRTHS-On Friday, at Mile-end Terrace, the Lady of John Dickens, Esq. a son. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
ON 10 February 1812 Charles Dickens's father, John Dickens, proudly, and more than a little pompously, announced the birth of his son three days earlier: BIRTHS-On Friday, at Mile-end Terrace, the Lady of John Dickens, Esq. a son. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Dickens is an author I have sadly neglected until now. Unexplainably so too, I'm quite frankly unable to say why exactly I haven't read anything by Dickens so far but, strangely enough perhaps, have read Peter Ackroyd's biography Dickens. However, when I recently determined to remedy this I simultaneously decided to go about it in thorough and methodical manner, so after having read the relevant chapter in Terry Eagleton's The English Novel: An Introduction and reading Patrick Parrinder's Nation and Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day I turned to this book, hoping to find a general, short overview of the man's life and work.
Well, that is exactly what this book provides in the short space of just 234 pages (including the index). There's a short chapter on Dickens' life, followed by separate chapters on a number of topics, each of which concisely describes the contemporary context and Dickens' relation to it:
- Dickens, Politics and Society
- The literary context (exploring in whose footsteps Dickens' tread, and his relation with contemporary authors)
- Urban society: London and Class
- Utilitarianism, Religion and History
- Science and Technology
- Recontextualizing Dickens (about Dickens' biographies, and stage and film adaptations of his novels)
The book concludes with a list for further reading, websites, a list of film and television adaptations of Dickens' novels, and an index. Sandler is an author who clearly knows his subject matter, and he presents it in an admirably concise and yet easy-to-read way. And, most importantly perhaps, he leaves one (or me at least) with a real appetite to read all of Dickens' novels!
Well, that is exactly what this book provides in the short space of just 234 pages (including the index). There's a short chapter on Dickens' life, followed by separate chapters on a number of topics, each of which concisely describes the contemporary context and Dickens' relation to it:
- Dickens, Politics and Society
- The literary context (exploring in whose footsteps Dickens' tread, and his relation with contemporary authors)
- Urban society: London and Class
- Utilitarianism, Religion and History
- Science and Technology
- Recontextualizing Dickens (about Dickens' biographies, and stage and film adaptations of his novels)
The book concludes with a list for further reading, websites, a list of film and television adaptations of Dickens' novels, and an index. Sandler is an author who clearly knows his subject matter, and he presents it in an admirably concise and yet easy-to-read way. And, most importantly perhaps, he leaves one (or me at least) with a real appetite to read all of Dickens' novels!
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Examines Dickens, his works and relevance today
27 Nov 2003
Format:Paperback
Much has been written about Charles Dickens' life, his works and literary influences in his time as well as today. All of these areas and more are addressed by Andrew Sanders in this exhaustive but highly readable examination of one of the legends of English literature.
It pulls together a wealth of material to reveal the complete Dickens, from his challenging upbringing and early literary successes to his popularity in the Victorian era and beyond.
This book is part of the `Authors in Context' series, a sub-series of the Oxford World's Classics series, which captures the essence of popular writers, including Oscar Wilde and Thomas Hardy (see my reviews on these books).
The series details a writer's life and times and also explores the social, cultural and political values that influenced their works. In addition to examining the writer's impact on their own times, each volume considers their interpretation today, in terms of being recontexualized on the stage and screen.
Andrew Sanders is ably qualified to discuss Charles Dickens. He is Professor of English at the University of Durham, and the author of six books on literature. These include several titles on Dickens, such as The Victorian Historical Novel, Charles Dickens: Resurrectionist, The Companion to A tale of Two Cities and Dickens and the Spirit of the Age.
Sanders presents fresh insights into the inner workings of the writer:
"He took old narrative forms and traditional ways of presenting character and he steadily transformed them. Dickens the novelist worked as an assured, independent, and professional writer in a way that few writers of the previous century had been able to do. He keenly responded to the demands of his audience as much as he drew his material directly from the social conditions, the whims and the peculiarities of that audience. He dwelt habitually as he famously put it in the preface to Bleak House on the `romantic side of familiar things', making fiction out of the raw material of the everyday, and vividly fixing what he had created in the imaginations of his readers."
`Charles Dickens' features detailed chapters on:
* Dickens' Life
* 'These Times of Ours': Dickens, Politics, and Society
* The Literary Context
* Urban Society: London and Class
* Utilitarianism, Religion, and History
* Science and Technology
* Recontextualizing Dickens
The volume features an extensive chronology that covers in detail the major works and events of Dickens' life in correlation to other well-known writers of the time, including Austen, Bronte, Byron and Keats. It also includes an extensive further reading section plus a range of web sites on the author.
While the book offers a wide range of information, it is presented in a colorful and highly readable manner, including a variety of anecdotes and reflections on the writer, his work and his relevance today.
Widely researched, this is perhaps the definitive reference on Charles Dickens - ideal for both Dickens academics and fans alike.
-- Michael Meanwell, author of the critically-acclaimed 'The Enterprising Writer' and 'Writers on Writing'. For more book reviews and prescriptive articles for writers, visit www.enterprisingwriter.com
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