Hard Times, A Longman Cultural Edition [Paperback]

Charles Dickens (Author), Jeff Nunokawa (Author), Gage McWeeny (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0321107217 | ISBN-13: 978-0321107213 | Publication Date: October 19, 2003 | Edition: 1st

Longman's new Cultural Editions Series, Hard Times, by Charles Dickens, edited by Jeff Nunokawa, includes Books 1-3 of Hard Times and contextual materials on the age of Dickens.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

From Longman's new Cultural Editions Series, Hard Times, by Charles Dickens, edited by Jeff Nunokawa, includes Books 1-3 of Hard Times and contextual materials on the age of Dickens. Books 1-3 of Hard Times is included along with extensive contextual material that helps readers understand Dickens' work more thoroughly Those interested in works by Charles Dickens.

About the Author

Gage McWeeny is Assistant Professor of English at Williams College, where he specializes in Victorian literature and culture. He is the author of articles that have appeared in _Victorian Poetry_ and _Critical Matrix_, and writes cultural criticism for BBC radio. He is currently at work on a book about social theory and Victorian literature called _The Comfort of Strangers: Sociality and Victorian LIterature_.

Jeff Nunokawa specializes in English literature from about 1830 till about 1900 at Princeton University.  His first book, The Afterlife of Property, studies how the novels of Dickens and Eliot labor to preserve the idea of secure possession by overseeing its transfer from the sphere of a cold and uncertain economy to a happier realm of romance.  Tame Passions of Wilde: Styles of Manageable Desire excavates the aspiration to imagine a form of desire as intense as those that compel us, but as light as the daydream or thought experiment safely under our control.  His current project is a book whose working title is "Eros and Isolation: Getting Away from Others in Nineteenth Century Literature."  This book brings a range of social theory to bear on writers like Austen, C. Brontë, Thackeray, Dickens and Eliot to figure out why it’s so hard to break free, even for a little while, from the groups that surround and define us. Most generally, he is interested in the ways that various ideas of society clash and collaborate with one another.  Before his day is done, he hopes to write a book about Henry James.

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Longman; 1st edition (October 19, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321107217
• ISBN-13: 978-0321107213
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #388,555 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

One of the grand masters of Victorian literature, Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Landport, Portsea, England. He died in Kent on June 9, 1870. The second of eight children of a family continually plagued by debt, the young Dickens came to know not only hunger and privation,but also the horror of the infamous debtors' prison and the evils of child labor. A turn of fortune in the shape of a legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and "slave" factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years' formal schooling at Wellington House Academy. He worked as an attorney's clerk and newspaper reporter until his Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837) brought him the amazing and instant success that was to be his for the remainder of his life. In later years, the pressure of serial writing, editorial duties, lectures, and social commitments led to his separation from Catherine Hogarth after twenty-three years of marriage. It also hastened his death at the age of fifty-eight, when he was characteristically engaged in a multitude of work.