University of Virginia Press Supposing 'Bleak House' (Victorian Literature and Culture Series)

Review Supposing Bleak House resists synthesizing its insight into a unified argument, instead allowing claims to resonate and multiply across psychoanalytic, narratological, and biographical perspectives. Supposing Bleak House is a rewarding study by one of Dickens's most perceptive and respected scholars. --Adam Grener, John Hopkins University Despite or because of his critical suppositions, Jordan makes some fine interventions into criticism of Bleak House . For all these wonderful suppositions this reader is grateful. --John Jordan's empathic study presents Esther Summerson as a psychoanalytic subject whose ontological pain emerges from the most poetic, uncanny passages in her retrospective narrative. Supposing Bleak House unfolds in effortless lucidity, gradually opening new critical and theoretical perspectives until Esther's story resonates delicately with Dickens's own, and with the novel's historical vision. Jordan's startlingly original readings of style and syntax remind us that Dickens's psychological intelligence is always deeper than we might have thought. --Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Boston College, author of Knowing DickensJordan guides us through the haunted chambers of Bleak House, from the psyche and syntax of its narrators to the book's mythological underpinnings to Dickens's construction of himself and the serial. Jordan is the most readable of readers. He never cuts a work down to size, but rather leaves it a more magically rich habitation for us to enjoy. This is now the gold standard of criticism for Dickens. --Robert L. Patten, Rice University, author of Charles Dickens and His Publishers Product Description This is an extended meditation on what many consider to be Dickens’s and nineteenth-century England’s greatest work of narrative fiction. About the Author John O. Jordan is Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Director of the Dickens Project, and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens.