Dickens and the politics of the family / Catherine Waters.

By:

Waters, Catherine

Material type: Text

TextPublication details: Cambridge, U.K. ; New York, N.Y. : Cambridge University Press, 1997.Description: 1 online resource (xi, 233 pages)Content type:

text

Media type:

computer

Carrier type:

online resource

ISBN:

0511002750
9780511002755
9780521573559
0521573556
0511583168
9780511583162
9780521021159
0521021154

Subject(s): Genre/Form:

Additional physical formats: Print version:: Dickens and the politics of the family.DDC classification:

823/.8 20

LOC classification:

PR4592.F36 W38 1997eb

Online resources:

Click here to access online

Contents:

Introduction: the making and breaking of the family -- Fractured families in the early novels: Oliver Twist and Dombey and Son -- Dickens, Christmas and the family -- Little Dorrit -- A Tale of Two Cities -- Great Expectations -- Our Mutual Friend.

Summary: The fictional representation of the family has long been regarded as a Dickensian speciality. But while nineteenth-century reviewers praised Dickens as the pre-eminent novelist of the family, any close examination of his novels reveals a remarkable disjunction between his image as the quintessential celebrant of the hearth, and his interest in fractured families. Catherine Waters offers an explanation of this discrepancy through an examination of Dickens's representation of the family in relation to nineteenth-century constructions of class and gender. Drawing upon feminist and new historicist methodologies, and focusing upon the normalising function of middle-class domestic ideology, Waters concludes that Dickens's novels record a shift in notions of the family away from an earlier stress upon the importance of lineage and blood towards a new ideal of domesticity assumed to be the natural form of the family.

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Originally presented as the author's thesis (Ph. D.).

Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-230) and index.

Print version record.

The fictional representation of the family has long been regarded as a Dickensian speciality. But while nineteenth-century reviewers praised Dickens as the pre-eminent novelist of the family, any close examination of his novels reveals a remarkable disjunction between his image as the quintessential celebrant of the hearth, and his interest in fractured families. Catherine Waters offers an explanation of this discrepancy through an examination of Dickens's representation of the family in relation to nineteenth-century constructions of class and gender. Drawing upon feminist and new historicist methodologies, and focusing upon the normalising function of middle-class domestic ideology, Waters concludes that Dickens's novels record a shift in notions of the family away from an earlier stress upon the importance of lineage and blood towards a new ideal of domesticity assumed to be the natural form of the family.

English.

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