Dickens and the Daughter of the House

ISBN-13: 9780521440769 / Angielski / Twarda / 2000 / 248 str.

Hilary Margo Schor

Opis

The daughter in Dickens' fiction is considered in this study not as an emblem of tranquil domesticity and the hearth-fire, but as a bearer of cultural values--and as a potentially disruptive force. As the good daughters in his novels (Little Nell, Agnes Wickfield, Esther Summerson, Amy Dorrit) must leave the father's house and enter the wider world, so they transform and rewrite the stories they are empowered to tell. The daughter's secret inheritance, her "portion," is to give Dickens a way of reading and writing his own culture differently.

Recenzje

'Hilary Schor's book has a noble end: to save Charles Dickens for a feminist readership. And she has succeeded. In the end, with the help of Schor's analysis, one cannot but admire the subtle ways in which this Victorian genius, very much like his contemporary Tennyson in 'The Lady of Shalott', let his heroines sign their names to their own stories.' English Studies

Spis treści

Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I. Making Fictions: 1. The uncanny daughter: Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and the progress of Little Nell; Part II. On Not Committing Adultery in the Novel: 2. Dombey and Son: the daughter's nothing; 3. Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities: the social inheritance of adultery; Part III. The Daughter's Portion: 4. Bleak House and the dead mother's property; 5. Amy Dorrit's prison notebooks; Part IV. A Violent Conclusion: 6. In the shadow of Satis House: the woman's story in Great Expectations; 7. Our Mutual Friend and the daughter's book of the dead; Notes; Index.