Publication year
2009Author(s)
Publisher
New York : Routledge
Series
Studies in Major Literary Authors
ISBN
9780415991360
Number of pages
167 p.
Publication type
Book (monograph)
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Organization
Engelse Taal en Cultuur
Subject
Studies in Major Literary Authors; Studying Criticism And Reception Across BordersAbstract
The first full-length study on the subject of Dickens and work, this book reshapes our understanding of Dickens by challenging a critical oversimplification: that Dickens's attitude towards work reflects conventional expressions of Victorian earnestness of the sort attributed also to Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and even more simplistically, Samuel Smiles. Instead, by analyzing a wide range of Dickens’s fiction and journalism in the light of new biographical and historical research, Louttit shows that Dickens is not interested in work as an abstract, positive value, or even in cataloguing it in concrete detail. What he explores instead is the human dimension of work: how, in other words, work affects the lives of those engaged in it. His writing about work is, as a result, best viewed not merely as a quasi-religious Gospel of Work, nor as an objective sociological report, but rather as what Louttit terms a "secular gospel."
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
- Academic publications [238441]
- Faculty of Arts [29387]
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