Author : Catherine Waters
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 0521573556
Total Pages : 247 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (215 download)
Book Synopsis Dickens and the Politics of the Family by : Catherine Waters
Download or read book Dickens and the Politics of the Family written by Catherine Waters and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-07-03 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.