Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

This book represents something of an experiment in male / female co-authorship. It approaches Great Expectations from a variety of perspectives, and studies in tum a number of key topics of the novel. These include : the rôle of the narrator Pirrip, the structure of the text as `progress,' the importance of Dickensian humour as the embodiment of a principle of excess, the novel's ironic commentary on the personal and public disasters of nineteenth-century life, and Dickens's powerful visual imagination, as this is expressed both in his vision of the phenomenal world and in his conception of human life as theatre. It then takes what is perhaps a more subversive look at Dickens's representation of women in the text which adopts a feminist point of view. In a concluding section, the two authors take time out to consider each others' contributions in an amicably critical way in order to stimulate the reader to arrive at some independent judgements of her or his own.