Contemporary Dickens
Contemporary Dickens

Author: Eileen Gillooly

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13:

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Edited by Eileen Gillooly and Deirdre David, Contemporary Dickens is a collection of essays that presents some of the most intriguing work being undertaken in Dickens studies today. Through an emphasis on the nineteenth-century origins of our current critical preoccupations and ways of knowing, these essays reveal Dickens to be our contemporary. The contributors argue that such issues as gender and sexuality, environmentalism, and the construction of national identity were frequently explored and sometimes problematically resolved by Dickens himself. They also illuminate the importance of Dickens's place in our current reassessment of critical methodologies. Drawing freely upon a variety of reading strategies (materialist, deconstructive, new historical, psychoanalytic, and feminist), the essays disclose new aspects of Dickens's engagements with a number of Victorian concerns--moral philosophy, the psychology of the emotions, and life writing among them--that have once again emerged as significant objects of study in early-twenty-first century criticism. Looking at such familiar topics from fresh perspectives, Contemporary Dickens is an original and challenging contribution to Dickens studies in particular and Victorian criticism in general. Contemporary Dickens will appeal to general readers and students of Victorian culture, as well as specialists in nineteenth-century literature, cultural studies, literary formalism, psychology, and gender studies.

God and Charles Dickens
God and Charles Dickens

Author: Gary L. Colledge

Publisher: Baker Books

Published: 2012-06-01

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 144123778X

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Charles Dickens's 200th birthday will be celebrated in 2012. Though his writings are now more than 100 years old, many remain in print and are avidly read and studied. Often overlooked--or unknown--are the considerable Christian convictions Dickens held and displayed in his work. This book fills that vacuum by examining Dickens the Christian and showing how Christian beliefs and practices permeate his work. This historical work is written for pastors, students, and laity alike. Chapters look at Dickens's life and work topically, arguing that Christian faith was front and center in some of what Dickens wrote (such as his children's work The Life of Our Lord) and saliently implicit throughout various other characters and plots. Since Dickens's Christian side is rarely considered, Gary Colledge illuminates a fresh angle of Dickens, and the 200th birthday makes it especially timely.

Giving
Giving

Author: Robert H. Bremner

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-28

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1351517473

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"According to Greek mythology mankind's first benefactor was the Titan, Prometheus, who gave fire, previously the exclusive possession of the gods, to mortal man." With these words the esteemed scholar Robert Bremner presents the first full-fledged history of attitudes toward charity and philanthropy. 'Giving' is a perfect complement to his earlier work The Discovery of Poverty in the United States. The word 'philanthropy' has been translated in a variety of ways: as a loving human disposition, loving kindness, love of mankind, charity, fostering mortal man, championing mankind, and helping people. Bremner's book covers all of these meanings in rich detail. Bremner describes the ancient world and classical attitudes toward giving and begging; Middle Ages and early modern times, emphasizing hospitals and patients and donors and attributes of charity; the eighteenth century and the age of benevolence; the nineteenth century and the growth of the concept of public relief and social policy; and a careful multiple chapter review of the twentieth century. Bremner reviews the act of giving in such comparative contexts as London, England and Kasrilevke, Russia with such figures as Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and Sholem Aleichem, as well as the more familiar wealthy industrialist/philanthropists, forming part of the narrative. The final chapters bring the story up to date, discussing the relationships of modem philanthropy and organized charity, and the uses of philanthropy in education and the arts. Bremner has an astonishing knowledge of the cultural context and the economic contents of philanthropy. As a result, this volume is intriguing as well as important history, written with lively style and wit. Whether the reader is a professional in the so-called "third stream" or "independent sector," or simply a citizen wondering just what the act of giving and the spirit of receiving is all about, 'Giving' will be compelling reading.

Dickens and Christmas
Dickens and Christmas

Author: Lucinda Hawksley

Publisher: Pen and Sword

Published: 2017-10-30

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1526712288

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A direct descendant of Charles Dickens delves into the many merry ways in which the author of A Christmas Carol celebrated & influenced the holiday. Dickens and Christmas is an exploration of the 19th-century phenomenon that became the Christmas we know and love today—and of the writer who changed, forever, the ways in which it is celebrated. Charles Dickens was born in an age of great social change. He survived childhood poverty to become the most adored and influential man of his time. Throughout his life, he campaigned tirelessly for better social conditions, including by his most famous work, A Christmas Carol. He wrote this novella specifically “to strike a sledgehammer blow on behalf of the poor man’s child,” and it began the Victorian’s obsession with Christmas. This new book, written by one of his direct descendants, explores not only Dickens’s most famous work, but also his all-too-often overlooked other Christmas novellas. It takes the readers through the seasonal short stories he wrote, for both adults and children, includes much-loved festive excerpts from his novels, uses contemporary newspaper clippings, and looks at Christmas writings by Dickens’s contemporaries. To give an even more personal insight, readers can discover how the Dickens family itself celebrated Christmas, through the eyes of Dickens’s unfinished autobiography, family letters, and his children’s memoirs. Dickens and Christmas also explores the ways in which his works have gone on to influence how the festive season is celebrated around the globe. “Brilliant . . . a very readable book, a slice of social history involving a man who, more than anyone, encapsulates Christmas in literature.”—Books Monthly

Angry Classrooms, Vacant Minds
Angry Classrooms, Vacant Minds

Author: Martin Morse Wooster

Publisher: Pacific Research Institute

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13:

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A refreshingly non-partisan survey of the history of American secondary education with suggestions and applications for contemporary reformers.