Oxford Reader S Companion To Dickens

Covers Dickens' life, works, reputation, and cultural context

Covers Dickens' life, works, reputation, and cultural context.

The Oxford Companion to Dickens (published in hardback as The Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens) offers in one volume a lively and authoritative compendium of information about Dickens: his life, his works, his reputation and his cultural context. In addition to entries on his works, his characters, his friends and places mentioned in his works, it includes extensive information about the age in which he lived and worked: the people, events, and institutions which provided the contextfor his work; the houses he lived in, the countries he visited, the ideas he satirised, the circumstances he responded to, the culture he participated in. Compiled by a distinguished editorial team, The Oxford Companion to Dickens provides a synthesis of the state of the art of Dickens studies and contains a more authoritative, concise, extensive and accessible range of information than any other reference work on Dickens.

Scholarly, ambitious and scrupulous'. This is how the TLS recently described the Oxford Reader's Companion Series. In September 2000, the book which pioneered the series, The Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens came out in paperback. Now the Oxford Reader's Companions to Hardy, Trollope, Conrad, and George Eliot will follow on from that success. In this format these books are designed specifically to appeal to students of literature. Each contains a more comprehensive and accessiblerange of information than any other reference work on these writers. Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski had an astonishing life. 'Pole, Catholic, and nobleman' is how he described himself as at the age of 5. He was born in the Ukraine of Polish parents and spent his childhood in exile. It was only after fifteen years at sea that he began writing in English, his third language and the one whose genius had, as he put it, 'adopted' him. Owen Knowles and Gene M. Moore, together with their teamof distinguished Advisers and Contributors, have created a unique and authoritative reference work on all things Conradian. Over 400 entries cover Conrad's novels, stories, essays, and reviews; his friends, family, and associates; films and adaptations; ships and voyages; places associated with his life and works; his influences and sources; his reputation and critical approaches to his work; historical contexts to his life. Entries include: Conrad's life: health, Polish inheritance,the sea, ships and voyages People: Borys Conrad, Apollo and Ewa Korzeniowski, J. M. Barrie, Stephen Crane, Stefan Zeromski Places: America, Bangkok, Berdyczow, Congo, Cracow, Marseilles Novels: Almayer's Folly, Lord Jim, Nostromo Stories, essays, and reviews: 'An Anarchist', 'Typhoon', 'Autocracy and War', 'Legends', 'Tales of the Sea' Influences and Sources: James Brooke, Alighieri Dante, Charles Dickens, Napoleon Bonaparte, Emile Zola Characters: Almayer family, Mr Jones, Jim, Captain Mitchell, Nostromo, the Professor, Edith Travers Reputation: biographies, films, influences on other writers, portraits and other images, translations Historical context: First World War, Polish question, women's suffrage movement In addition to the A-Z entries the Companion offers extra material: a classified contents list with headwords grouped in thematic batches, Conrad's family tree, a useful chronology spanning Conrad's life, maps showing Conrad's travels, an index ofreferences to Conrad's works, and an alphabetical list of frequently cited texts.

The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens contains fourteen specially-commissioned chapters by leading international scholars, who together provide diverse but complementary approaches to the full span of Dickens's work, with particular focus on his major fiction. The essays cover the whole range of Dickens's writing, from Sketches by Boz through The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Separate chapters address important thematic topics: childhood, the city, and domestic ideology. Others consider formal features of the novels, including their serial publication and Dickens's distinctive use of language. Three final chapters examine Dickens in relation to work in other media: illustration, theatre, and film. Each essay provides guidance to further reading. The volume as a whole offers a valuable introduction to Dickens for students and general readers, as well as fresh insights, informed by recent critical theory, that will be of interest to scholars and teachers of the novels.

A Companion to Charles Dickens concentrates on the historical, ideological, and social forces that defined Dickens’s world. Puts Dickens’s work into its literary, historical, and social contexts Traces the development of Dickens’s career as a journalist and novelist Includes original essays by leading Dickensian scholars on each of Dickens’s fifteen novels Explores a broad range of topics, including criticisms of his novels, the use of history and law in his fiction, language, and the effect of political and social reform Examines Dickens's legacy and surveys the mass of secondary materials that has been generated in response and reverence to his writing

This anniversary edition of the Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens celebrates 200 years since the birth of one of Britain's most popular authors. Covering his life, his works, his reputation, and his cultural context in over 500 A-Z articles, this is the most reliable and accessible reference work on Dickens available

This volume discusses traditional and new resources for researching British literature of the Victorian and Edwardian ages and the ways in which those resources can be used in conjunction with one another.