List of Figures Preface Introduction: Dickens and the Pleasures of Memory 1. Memory's Bonds: Associationism and the Freedom of Thought 2. Dickens's Originality: Serial Fiction, Celebrity, and The Pickwick Papers 3. The Pleasures of Memory, Part I: Curiosity as Didacticism in The Old Curiosity Shop 4. The Pleasures of Memory, Part II: Epitaphic Reading and Cultural Memory 5. Learning by Heart in Our Mutual Friend 6. Dickens's Laughter: School Reading and Democratic Literature, 1870-1940 Afterword Notes Bibliography Index
Sarah Winter is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.
"It is well known that Dickens established an 'imagined community' founded on his own writing and authorial presence; in her intriguing book, Sarah Winter reveals how he did it. Analyzing the relation between serialization, reading, and memory, and detailing the extraordinary means by which Dickens made himself an institution by appearing to subvert the very nature of institutions, Winter shows how Dickens installed his works, his memories, his authorial presence, and perhaps most influentially, his method of publication---seriality itself--at the center of our collective modern consciousness." -- -Audrey Jaffe University of Toronto "A fine contribution to the sociology of literature ... Highly Recommended." -Choice "The Pleasures of Memory brings a welcome flash of insight to the centuries-old and much-rehashed argument regarding Dickens's politics. The present critical moment has seen the likes of William Flesch, Sharon Marcus, and Nicholas Dames rethink 'reading' in ingeniously new ways. Winter accomplishes the feat of throwing an equally original and yet persuasively commonsensical hat into the ring. She reads Dickens's serial novels from Pickwick through Our Mutual Friend to show how overtly they thematized the mode of their reception in associationist terms as collective or cultural memory. In doing so, she argues (brilliantly, to my mind), that producing serial novels was a political project. Dickens saw popular literature as the means of universal public education." -- -Nancy Armstrong Duke University "The Pleasures of Memory is the book on Dickens we have been waiting for. It is also a major study of the Victorian public sphere. Sarah Winter shows how Dickensian serial fiction-the most potent of nineteenth-century new media- cultivated a field of democratic thinking separate from political institutions. Authoritative, lucid, and wide-ranging, this is the most convincing analysis of literature's social function I've read in recent years." -- -Ian Duncan University of California, Berkeley
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