Dickens

The essays collected in this volume offer fresh readings of Dickenss travelogues and novels, often pointing to the many-sidedness of his personality. The uncommercial traveller emerges as an ecumenical John Bull, chary of the alien but greedy of novelty, a man whose incursions on well-trodden or unfamiliar ground are always journeys into the uncanny. Besides dealing with the geography of the novelists imagination, the book explores numerous new worlds such as the inspiring world of Victorian science and Dickenss responses to it or the world of modern literary theory that shapes our own responses to his work.