Overview

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.

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9783319967905

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Reviews

Strengths of this study include its extensive close readings, attention to historical and cultural context, and identification of parallels between Romantic and Dickensian imagery. While the book will primarily be useful to literary scholars or humanists working on Dickens, it will also appeal to historians or scholars in cultural studies interested in the effects of indus-trialization, science, technology, modernity, and urbanization on the individual and society. (Kristen Starkowski, Journal of Victorian Culture, March 14, 2019)

Author Information

Peter Cook is Senior Lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK. His publications cover a wide range of interests, from the Romantics to Ted Hughes.

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