Knowing Dickens
Rosemarie Bodenheimer
"A revealing and concealing intelligence lurks somewhere—but where, exactly?—in Dickens's writing. To capture something of that knowing Dickens who eludes us, I follow some representative clusters of thought and feeling that link Dickens's ways of talking in letters with his concerns in fiction and journalism. What are the internal plots this writer carried around throughout his life, his characteristic patterns of experience, response, and counterresponse? What shapes recur in the various forms of writing and acting that make up this life?"—from Knowing Dickens
In this compelling and accessible book Rosemarie Bodenheimer explores the thoughtworld of the Victorian novelist who was ... Read more
Knowing Dickens is the first book to systematically explore Dickens's abundant correspondence in relation to his published writings. Gathering evidence from letters, journalistic essays, stories, and novels that bear on a major issue or pattern of response in Dickens's life and work, Bodenheimer cuts across familiar storylines in Dickens biography and criticism in chapters that take up topics including self-defensive language, models of memory, relations of identification and rivalry among men, houses and household management, and walking and writing.
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About Rosemarie Bodenheimer
Reviews for Knowing Dickens
Michael Slater
The Dickensian
The chapters of this brilliant study of Charles Dickens are 'built around certain recurrent clusters of thought and feeling in Dickens's writing, in order to illuminate some of the ways of knowing that drove his ... Read more