Charles Dickens’s Great(est) Expectation: The Death of The Author
Charles Dickens’s Great(est) Expectation: The Death of The Author

Summary/Abstract: Academics, critics and readers frequently adopt a rather stereotypical view on Charles Dickens’s literary work. Admittedly, the author of David Copperfield stands out as a remarkable story-teller and, implicitly, as a very popular writer, both during his lifetime and post mortem, but he pays a significant price for this popularity nevertheless. The tribute in question would consist in an inevitable lack of intellectual sophistication, presumably manifest throughout his novels. Commentators generally argue that he was more interested, as a novelist, in addressing large and heterogeneous groups of Victorian consumers of literature than in shaping profoundly parabolic and symbolic textual constructions. Ultimately, this represents a critical prejudice and, therefore, the present article aims at asserting the opposite.

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