Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction
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A01=Ushashi Dasgupta
Author_Ushashi Dasgupta
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSBF
Category=DSK
Category=NL-DS
COP=United Kingdom
Discount=15
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Format=BB
Format_Hardback
HMM=240
IMPN=Oxford University Press
ISBN13=9780198859116
Language_English
PA=Available
PD=20200603
POP=Oxford
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
PUB=Oxford University Press
SMM=24
SN=Oxford English Monographs
Subject=Literature: History & Criticism
WG=672
WMM=163
Product details
- ISBN 9780198859116
- Format: Hardback
- Weight: 672g
- Dimensions: 163 x 240 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 20 May 2020
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- Publication City/Country: Oxford, GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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When Dickens was nineteen years old, he wrote a poem for Maria Beadnell, the young woman he wished to marry. The poem imagined Maria as a welcoming landlady offering lodgings to let. Almost forty years later, Dickens died, leaving his final novel unfinished - in its last scene, another landlady sets breakfast down for her enigmatic lodger. These kinds of characters are everywhere in Dickens's writing. Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction: The Lodger World explores the significance of tenancy in his fiction.
In nineteenth century Britain the vast majority of people rented, rather than owned, their homes. Instead of keeping to themselves, they shared space - renting, lodging, taking lodgers in, or simply living side-by-side in a crowded modern city. Charles Dickens explored both the chaos and the unexpected harmony to be found in rented spaces, the loneliness and sociability, the interactions between cohabitants, the complex gender dynamics at play, and the relationship between space and money. Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction demonstrates that a cosy, secluded home life was beyond the reach of most Victorian Londoners, and considers Dickens's nuanced conception of domesticity. Tenancy maintained an enduring hold upon his imagination, giving him new stories to tell and offering him a set of models to think about authorship. He celebrated the fact that unassuming houses brim with narrative potential: comedies, romances, and detective plots take place behind their doors. Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction: The Lodger World wedges these doors open.
Ushashi Dasgupta is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oxford and Jonathan and Julia Aisbitt Fellow of English at Pembroke College.
