Great expectations, Charles Dickens

Ever since Edmund Wilson's Dickens: the Two Scrooges, one of the hallmarks of Dickens criticism has been a disturbing kind of socio-psychological probing, with insights nowadays being drawn from poststructuralist and feminist thought.

At the same time, however, some critics are beginning to rehabilitate 'old-fashioned' topics such as Dickens's characters, his comic plotting, and his relations with his readers - then and now.

The New Casebook includes an extensive introduction which connects these trends to developments in literary theory. And of the hundreds of recent accounts of Great Expectations, twelve of the most representative are presented uncut or in substantial extracts.