商品簡介
"My book sets out to explore three crucial stages in Dickens' ongoing voyage of discovery into what has been called the "hidden springs" of his fiction. The three novels under examination are Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son, and Bleak House. (Other Dickens writings are considered when pertinent.) I argue that in all three we can witness Dickens responding to some identifiable force represented as coming from underneath the ground plan (plot, character interaction, development of themes, stylistic effects) of the book in question. In Oliver Twist, it is the ancient story of the blood libel; in Dombey and Son, it is the power of language as an independent agent; in Bleak House, it is a pre-verbal array of desires and interdicts. I also explore the question ofDickens' self-awareness, at these different stages: to what extent did he see himself as a medium of forces beyond his conscious control, and what did he think the psychological mechanisms at work might be? The issues raised have certainly been considered before but have not gone in the directions taken here. Many critics, for instance, have commented on anti-Semitism in Oliver Twist, and some have mentioned the blood libel; no one has argued that Oliver Twist is a blood libel. Previous considerations ofideas of the subconscious have been overwhelmingly Freudian and have concentrated on Dickens' biography; mine, by contrast, relies on pre-Freudian concepts common in Dickens' time and concentrates on the evidence of the writings"--
作者簡介
John Gordon is a Professor of English at Connecticut College. He is the author of four books of literary analysis and over fifty articles and monographs, primarily on modern literature and culture. His most recent books are Physiology and the Literary Imagination: Romantic to Modern and Joyce and Reality: The Empirical Strikes Back.
