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Dickens's Great Expectations: Misnar's Pavilion Versus Cinderella

Dickens's Great Expectations: Misnar's Pavilion Versus Cinderella

Hardcover

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0813122287
ISBN13: 9780813122281
Publisher: Univ Pr Of Kentucky
Published: May 17 2002
Pages: 296
Weight: 1.35
Height: 0.96 Width: 6.16 Depth: 9.52
Language: English

Dickens scholar Jerome Meckier's acclaimed Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction examined fierce literary competition between leading novelists who tried to establish their credentials as realists by rewriting Dickens's novels. Here, Meckier argues that in Great Expectations, Dickens not only updated David Copperfield but also rewrote novels by Lever, Thackeray, Collins, Shelley, and Charlotte and Emily Brontë. He periodically revised his competitors' themes, characters, and incidents to discredit their novels as unrealistic fairy tales imbued with Cinderella motifs. Dickens darkened his fairy tale perspective by replacing Cinderella with the story of Misnar's collapsible pavilion from The Tales of the Genii (a popular, pseudo-oriental collection). The Misnar analogue supplied a corrective for the era's Cinderella complex, a warning to both Haves and Have-nots, and a basis for Dickens's tragicomic view of the world.

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Literary Criticism