Reading Dickens's Bleak House

By: Richard Gravil

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

A Literature Insight on one of the supreme achievements of Victorian fiction, stressing the experimentalism of the dual narrative and its liberal feminist implications. This work opens with a general introduction to Dickens in the context of his times, stressing the public themes of the novel and its status as experimental fiction. Other chapters include a survey of its major characters and aspects of Dickens's characterization; the pleasures of serial reading; an exploration of Dickens's craft and the status of this novel as an experimental fiction; detailed analysis of key passages; a discussion of Dickens and 'the woman question', and a survey of critical reception of what many regard as Dickens's greatest novel. Richard Gravil is the author of Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-American Continuities, 1776–1862 (St Martin’s Press, 2000), Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation 1787–1842 (Palgrave, 2003), and Wordsworth and Helen Maria Williams; or, the Perils of Sensibility (Humanities-Ebooks, 2008), and of Literature Insights on Elizabeth Gaskell: Mary Barton and Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads. He has edited or co-edited Master Narratives: Tellers and Telling in the English Novel (Ashgate, 2001), and critical works on Swift, Wordsworth, and Coleridge.