Nineteenth-Century British Literature Then and Now: Reading with Hindsight

Examining works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, William Morris and John Ruskin, Dentith uses the notion of hindsight to approach issues of interpretation and historicity. It is possible, Dentith argues, to read historical literature with an awareness of the historical context and of the difference between the past and the present while allowing that friction or difference to be part of how we think about a text and how it communicates.