Critical Texts on Dickens' Great Expectations

Someone else asked me about critical texts on Great Expectations. Where does one begin?

The Dickens Universe at UC Santa Cruz (they hold a summer conference on Dickens) has bibliographies for the novels they have studied over the years. Here's a link to the one for Great Expectations with the critical articles on the first page being the "must read" ones (at least according to the list compiler):

PDF of Dickens' Universe Bibliography for Great Expectations

Also the Victorian Web has several bibliographies of critical material on the novel.

Victorian Web Great Expectations' Bibliographies

 

Chapter Summary Chart for Great Expectations

Somebody asked me to share the very brief chapter summary chart for Great Expectations that I showed the class. Here it is:

Brief Chapter Topics for Dicken's Great Expectations

A Brief But Clear Discussion of Accentual Verse

I was thinking about preparing a handout for class on the difference between syllabic, accentual-syllabic, and accentual verse (Gee, Professor, tell me more!), but I came across this excellent and highly readable discussion of what is, in fact, one of the most important and most misunderstood topics in the study of literature: prosody and scansion.

http://danagioia.com/essays/writing-and-reading/accentual-verse/ 

Dana Gioia is the former head of the National Endowment for the Arts and the current State Poet Laureate of California.

BBC Documentary on G. M. Hopkins

You might enjoy this BBC Documentary on Gerard Manley Hopkins. It includes some very nice readings from his poems and a brief but helpful discussion of "haecceity" (roughly translated as "thisness") and the concept behind Hopkins' own terms: inscape and instress.

Some Quick Notes on Rossetti's "Goblin Market"

So much to discuss with this poem, but so little time.

Here are some notes I sketched out simply by starting with a simple observation and then asking a few questions. (There are probably hundreds of simple observations a reader could begin with and hundreds of questions that could follow.) The simple observation is that the poem cannot possibly be what it appears to be--i.e. a story about two sisters' encounters with goblin men selling fruit. That's what the story the poem tells, but that can't possibly be what the poem's "about." If that's so, then each aspect of the poem (characters, plot, etc.) must represent something else, either as allegory (a one-to-one mapping) or as symbol (a one-to-many mapping). (I prefer symbol to allegory; very few texts are explicitly allegorical.)

1. What do the goblin men represent?
2. Cautionary tale, unruly sexual appetites
3. Religious allegory of sin and redemption
4. Struggle between temptation and desire (Lizzie stops her ears, Laura eats)
1. Victorian angel
2. female (hetero)sexuality
3. homoerotic imagery
4. Jeanie, the “fallen” woman
5. Lizzie as a female hero—who triumphs through submission and renunciation (?); Christ-like self-sacrifice
5. What does the goblins’ fruit represent?
1. sexual desire
2. prostitution
3. economic power
4. imperial capitalism
5. masculinity
6. original sin
7. Eucharistic redemption
8. Or maybe the fruit is just fruit and the poem is about shopping?
6. Who is the poem meant for?
1. the ending attempts to control the poem’s reception
2. Laura relates the story and the moral to her daughters

                                                              i.      tidies up energies released with trite moral

1.      vulnerable young misses must resist the dangers of desire and strange men with tempting fruits

2.      the need for sisterly solidarity

Key Issues

1. Separate Spheres
1. poem supports middle-class Victorian views of ideal women as self-sacrificing and nurturing (Lizzie)
2. but Lizzie’s heroism blurs traditional boundaries between public and private (she moves freely between them, regenerating one through manipulating the other)
2. Marketplace
1. economic language that equates female sexual exchange with mercantile exchange
2. buying and selling fruit in goblin market

                                                              i.      Laura’s “golden lock” = gold coin

                                                            ii.      her hair (sign of female sexuality) is a form of cash

Second Essay Assignment

Here's a link to a PDF of the second essay assignment, which was distributed in class on Tuesday (2/23).

ENGL 468 Second Essay Assignment

The "original" ending to Great Expectations

The Oxford Major Authors, Penguin, and Norton Critical editions of Great Expectations (as well as many others probably) reproduce the original ending to the novel usually in an appendix or sometimes in a note to the text.
If you don't have access to the original ending, here's how you can reconstruct it. Find the dialogue between Pip and Biddy that occurs near the beginning of the final chapter. The dialogue concludes with Pip saying, "My dear Biddy, I have forgotten nothing in my life that ever had a foremost place there, and little that ever had any place there. But that poor dream, as I once used to call it, has all gone by, Biddy,-- all gone by!" Substitute the short passage below for all the remaining text in the novel.

     It was four years more, before I saw herself. I had heard of her as leading a most unhappy life, and as being separated from her husband who had used her with great cruelty, and who had become quite renowned as a compound of pride, brutality, and meanness.

     I had heard of the death of her husband (from an accident consequent on ill-treating a horse), and of her being married again to a Shropshire doctor, who, against his interest, had once very manfully interposed, on an occasion when he was in professional attendance on Mr. Drummle, and had witnessed some outrageous treatment of her. I had heard that the Shropshire doctor was not rich, and that they lived on her own personal fortune.

     I was in England again — in London, and walking along Piccadilly with little Pip — when a servant came running after me to ask would I step back to a lady in a carriage who wished to speak to me. It was a little pony carriage, which the lady was driving; and the lady and I looked sadly enough on one another.

     "I am greatly changed, I know; but I thought you would like to shake hands with Estella, too, Pip. Lift up that pretty child and let me kiss it!" (She supposed the child, I think, to be my child.)

     I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview; for, in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance, that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham's teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be. 

(The above passage is based on the proof slip reproduced by Edgar Rosenberg in the W. W. Norton (1999) edition of Great Expectations, p. 492, retrieved from the Victorian Web (http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/ge/ending.html).