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Charles Dickens's Our mutual friend : a publishing history

Even within the context of Charles Dickens's history as a publishing innovator, Our Mutual Friend is notable for what it reveals about Dickens as an author and about Victorian publishing. Marking Dickens's return to the monthly number format after nearly a decade of writing fiction designed for weekly publication in All the Year Round, Our Mutual Friend emerged against the backdrop of his failing health, troubled relationship with Ellen Ternan, and declining reputation among contemporary critics. In his subtly argued publishing history, Sean Grass shows how these difficulties combined to make Our Mutual Friend an extraordinarily odd novel, no less in its contents and unusually heavy revisions than in its marketing by Chapman and Hall, its transformation from a serial into British and U.S. book editions, its contemporary reception by readers and reviewers, and its delightfully uneven reputation among critics in the 150 years since Dickens's death.Enhanced by four appendices that offer contemporary accounts of the Staplehurst railway accident, information on archival materials, transcripts of all of the contemporary reviews, and a select bibliography of editions, Grass's book shows why this last of Dickens's finished novels continues to intrigue its readers and critics.

The reader in the Dickensian mirrors : some new language

Through close attention to the representation of the reader in 10 of Dickens novels, this study brings their specifically Victorian assumptions into direct confrontation with the insights of modern critical theory. In doing so, the study locates in Dickens a tendency to reanimate the ancient principle of mimesis that not only does the text become a mirror held up to its reader but, in a radical revision of our post-Saussurean understanding, language becomes not so much a decontructive system of differences as a reconstructive system of resemblances. In short, Schad is finally concerned with some new and quite mythical idea of language.

American notes ; and, Pictures from Italy