Peter Conrad

Dickens the Enchanter (eBook, ePUB)

Inside the Explosive Imagination of the Great Storyteller

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

A kaleidoscopic investigation of Dickens's imagination and the world he created.

See Dickens as never before in this creative biography, which delves into his novels, journalistic essays and letters to reveal his strange, hilarious but obsessive personal character and the audacity of a mind that set out, as he said, to rearrange the universe.

Peter Conrad's bold rediscovery of Dickens suggests that he alone rivals Shakespeare and in some ways betters him. As well as re-examining the great novels, Conrad's book probes the journalism in which Dickens reports on his risky ventures into the urban underworld. It also describes the celebrated but dangerously over-intense public readings in which, as at a seance, he allowed his most terrifying characters to take possession of him. Ultimately it
reveals how the forces of creation and destruction come together in Dickens, who despite his reputation for jollity and effusive sentiment found it increasingly hard to control the madness and violence of his own self-destructive genius.

Dickens the Enchanter takes us deep into an imagination whose power and originality struck some contemporaries as godlike while others thought it demonic. If you already love Dickens, it will renew your understanding of him; if you have yet to read him, it will lure you into his astonishing, alarming, enchanted world.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury UK eBooks
• Seitenzahl: 304
• Erscheinungstermin: 27. Februar 2025
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781399409155
• Artikelnr.: 73200378

Autorenporträt

Peter Conrad is a literary critic and cultural historian. His books include The Everyman History of English Literature; Creation: Artists, Gods & Origins; and Modern Times, Modern Places: Life and Art in the Twentieth Century.

Inhaltsangabe

Preface: A Visionary Companion
1 On Planet Dick
2 In the Family
3 In the Dark
4 Cabbalistic Words
5 The Great Creator
6 Devilkins
7 In Arabia
8 Species and Origins
9 In the Carvery
10 In the Forge
11 Arranging the Universe
12 Heroes of His Own Life
13 The So Potent Art
14 In the Crypt
Acknowledgements
Select Bibliography
Index

Rezensionen

If you have not read Dickens for a while – or ever – this reading of the novels will convert you. Reading Conrad, who for many years taught English literature at Oxford, makes you realise why so many of his hundreds of former pupils adore and praise him.