Sensation and Sublimation in Charles Dickens [Hardcover]

This book explores three crucial stages in Dickens' on-going voyage of discovery into what has been called the 'hidden springs' of his fiction; arguing that in three of Dickens best known novels, we witness Dickens responding to some identifiable force represented as coming from underneath the ground plan?of the book in question.What Right Have They to Butcher Me?' 'Thankee, Mum,' said Toodle, 'Since You Are Suppressing' 'In a Thick Crowd of Sounds, but Still Intelligibly Enough to be Understood' 'Is Esther Pretty?' and Nine Other Questions About Bleak House

The reader of this excellent study of Dickens's Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son, and Bleak House quickly becomes

enmeshed in Gordon's impassioned inquiries. Exhilarating reads, these serious novels provide inexhaustible material

for critical analyses. Drawing on the work of such scholars as J. Hillis Miller, Terry Castle, and Michel Slater (author

of the magisterial Charles Dickens, CH, Apr'10, 47-4288), Gordon (Connecticut College) sheds light on Dickens's

magical force. Among the topics he examines are pedophilia, anti-Semitism, industrialism, capitalism, and liminal

experiences. Dickens's complex narrative style includes a variety of tropes - melodrama, fairy tale, the gothic. The

three novels depict child sacrifice, corrupt patriarchs, and social disharmony. Oliver Twist is preoccupied by sadism

and infanticide, horrors Dickens buffers with Oliver's good fortune and hypnagogic trances. Dombey and Bleak

House move beyond that fairy-tale world, dealing with contemporaneous social institutions and issues (railroads,

capitalism, social leadership). In the complex Bleak House, women's trials constitute a special subset of issues as

women seek satisfaction in an elusive motherhood; the narrative intertwines a retrospective, woundedlCr