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Charles Dickens's experience and imagining of creativity is at the heart of his self-awareness, subject-matter and narrative. His intelligence works intuitively rather than conceptually and ideas about imagination often emerge informally in personal letters and implicitly through characters, language and story. His self-analysis and reflexive tendency are embedded in his styles and forms of narrative and dialogue, images of normality, madness, extremity, subversion and disorder, poetry and inter-textuality, anticipating and shaping the languages of modernism, influencing James Joyce and Virginia Woolf as well as traditionalists like H.G. Wells and Evelyn Waugh. Discussing Dickens's novels and some of his letters, sketches, essays and stories, Barbara Hardy offers a fascinating demonstration of creativity. Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Note on Editions -- Preface -- 1 A Career and its Context -- 2 Dickens Discusses Creativity -- 3 The Awareness of Art in Sketches By Boz, Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Barnaby Rudge, The Old Curiosity Shop and The Chimes -- 4 The Artist as Narrator in Doctor Marigold, David Copperfield, Bleak House and Great Expectations -- 5 Talkative Men and Women in Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit and Little Dorrit -- 6 Imaginative Extremes, Negations and Norms -- 7 Subversions and Oppositions -- 8 Crises of Imagination in Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, Dombey and Son, Bleak House, Hard Times and The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices -- 9 Forecast and Fantasy in Little Dorrit -- 10 Creative Conversation in Hard Times, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend -- 11 Assertions of Style: Rhythm and Repetition in A Tale of Two Cities and Our Mutual Friend -- 12 Shakespeare in Dickens: David Copperfield and Great Expectations -- 13 Dickens in the Twentieth Century -- Sources -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y.
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