Features
Tuesday, May 22 2012
Charles Dickens Through the Lens of Canonicity
Critical discourse on Charles Dickens – especially late Dickens, most especially of all Bleak House – has gotten out of hand, and finds itself concentrating on virtues that Dickens doesn’t actually possess in a bid to shoehorn him into our notion of what a great writer is and what his writing does.
Thursday, February 23 2012
Charles Dickens 200: Great Expectations: Bright Hope and Dark Resignation
Where we are now, in 2012, is on a darker plain especially for the large "Underclass". Perhaps Dickens can light our way?
Columns
Tuesday, June 21 2011
Reality, and Then Some, as Conveyed in 'The Wire' and 'Oliver Twist'
The spoonful of sugar that The Wire employs in relating its harsh theme is all wrapped up in that medicine's themes of fatalism. The humor employed in Oliver Twist highlights the opposite: the needlessness of the system that allows orphans to starve to death.
Blogs
Thursday, January 26 2012
'Charles Dickens: A Life' Brings Dickens Down to Earth
Clare Tomalin's timely biography focuses on how the man who wrote both heroes and villains so well found elements of both in himself.
Wednesday, January 25 2012
The Curious Case of the Closure of the Charles Dickens Museum
Charles Dickens is a national, if not international, cultural figure. Is it such a problem that the London museum dedicated to him will be closed for the bicentenary?
News
Thursday, February 9 2012
Q&A with Dickens scholar
When Ruth Schuldiner reads Charles Dickens, she is transported back in time. Schuldiner, 27, of Akron, Ohio, is working on her doctorate in English literature…
