The Romantic Legacy of Charles Dickens

Description

This book explores the relationship between Dickens and canonical Romantic authors: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, and Keats. Addressing a significant gap in Dickens studies, four topics are identified: Childhood, Time, Progress, and Outsiders, which together constitute the main aspects of Dickens’s debt to the Romantics. Through close readings of key Romantic texts, and eight of Dickens’s novels, Peter Cook investigates how Dickens utilizes Romantic tropes to express his responses to the exponential growth of post-revolutionary industrial, technological culture and its effects on personal life and relationships. In this close study of Dickensian Romanticism, Cook demonstrates the enduring relevance of Dickens and the Romantics to contemporary culture. Front Matter ....Pages i-xiii Introduction (Peter Cook)....Pages 1-29 Childhood (Peter Cook)....Pages 31-84 Time (Peter Cook)....Pages 85-142 Progress (Peter Cook)....Pages 143-196 Outsiders (Peter Cook)....Pages 197-253 Conclusion (Peter Cook)....Pages 255-269 Back Matter ....Pages 271-276