Publisher's Synopsis
This is the first full-length study of the treatment of women in Dickens novels to make use of modern critical approaches. It replaces traditional biographical methods with a new linguistic model which directs attention back to the texts.
Patricia Ingham s innovatory approach characterises Dickens novelistic language by relating it to linguistic representations of women in contemporary non-fictional works (handbooks on womanly conduct, documentary works on prostitution, and Florence Nightingale s Cassandra). This analysis reveals that Dickens individual account of the womanly ideal is shot through with contradiction. Fallen women are both degraded and valuable, worthless and powerful; ideal women are desirable and undesirable, passive and destructive of the very social structure they are supposed to sustain.
The book s conclusion is that the ambiguous struggle between convention and dissent in the language he uses for representing women charges Dickens novels with their uneasy excitement and power.
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