Charles Dickens
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A personal approach to Dickens's art that pays attention to what magnetizes Federico or strikes her as newly relevant to our own world, and to her life, as she explores what Dickens' works are emotionally about.
Dickens's first concern in all his fiction is with people's feelings and their imaginations. Everything else--the social criticism, the satire, the comedy--flows from that spring. How does a person begin to imagine, to enter vividly into the life he or she has been given, and into the lives of others? How does someone change, how do they love, give their trust, look forward to the future? These questions make their way into all of Dickens's novels, including the four discussed in this contribution to the My Reading series: Oliver Twist (1837-39), David Copperfield (1849-50), Little Dorrit (1855-57), and A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Consistent with the aims of the series, this book takes a personal approach to Dickens's art. Federico follows her own responses, paying attention to what magnetizes her or strikes her as newly relevant to our own world, and to her life. What is the story emotionally about? This becomes the important question as she reads through Dickens's works. It is the question that opens the door to her own memories, her own stories, as she grows from being an innocent reader of Dickens to a more critical, professionalized one--while still listening confidentially to what Dickens has to teach her about hope, love, and the limits of knowledge.
Annette Federico is Professor of English at James Madison University. Her books include Engagements with Close Reading (2016) and Thus I Lived with Words: Robert Louis Stevenson and the Writer's Craft (2017). She has published two edited collections, Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic After Thirty Years (2009) and My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice (2020). She lives in Harrisonburg, Virginia, USA.