... the surprisingly extensive antebellum engagement with Bleak House on the part of African Americans and abolitionists, I show how such a combination of methods enables us to tease out the determinants, mechanics, and implications of readerly identification and appropriation across racial and national lines. African...

... lie latent in the length itself of the triple-decker novel? A reading of Bleak House suggests that its expansive form specifically allowed Dickens to represent multiple social, economic, and institutional networks. Linking the many characters in Bleak House is a dense overlapping of networked...

...David Ben-Merre Charles Dickens's Bleak House depicts the changing epistemologies of the nineteenth century, celebrating the emergent figure of the detective and a verifiable inductive method as the dominant mode of knowledge production. At the climax of the novel, however, this epistemology...

...Tyson Stolte This article reads Dickens's fascination with rotting bodily matter in Bleak House as a response to mid-Victorian psychological debates about the nature of mind and the possibility of immortality. Critics have tended to treat the novel's fixation on such matter as primarily a product...

... for ecocriticism, which has often privileged immersive experience and a relatively simplistic view of the referentiality of language, particularly realism, known as “ecomimesis.” Reading Charles Dickens's Bleak House alongside the artificial climates contained in Victorian glasshouses, this article argues...

... “obliterate” social cohesion or at least make its incoherence legible? This essay turns to Charles Dickens's Bleak House to think about the negative aspect of the novel's involvement in the horizon of legibility of social relations. It focuses on the novel's representation of mud—both as the abject material...

...Emily Steinlight This article demonstrates both the formal logic and the political stakes of Dickens's refusal to solve the problem his narratives create: the condition of a vast multitude that the impersonal narrator of Bleak House only half-ironically terms “supernumeraries.” Applied...

...Laura Strout Abstract What insights into literary realism can be found by dwelling in the empty rooms and abandoned spaces of Bleak House , a novel more often read for its representation of overcrowded environments? Traveling between and imaginatively inhabiting empty houses of Charles Dickens's...

... American republic by comparing the spread of information to the spread of yellow fever. Unlike other novels that focus on the spread of contagious disease (such as Dickens's Bleak House ), Arthur Mervyn refuses to trace a clear path of transmission from person to person. Instead, the randomness...

... was something we needed very badly in this time, but that very few people had it, and it was certainly a long way from me” (qtd. in 138). Both the radicals and liberal Paul are trying to devise strategies and temperaments suited to “struggle under bleak conditions” (139). What Anderson implies, but cannot quite...

... otherness was not nearly other enough (3l'his suspicion or anxiety leads to the "uncanny return of colonial otherness" (3)-a return apparent in the works of domestic novelists and social critics. The book con- tains chapter-length readings of Jane Eyre and The Egoist, Bleak House, The Moonstone...

... details and individual storylines are part of a larger canvas in which everything might connect meaningfully” (113). Bleak House is but one of the novels that contributed to what Agathocleous presents as a cross-media endeavor to portray London as if it were the world. Urban Realism opens...

... equipped to self-reflexively foreground mediation itself—to redirect our attention from the pursuit of a truth contained within to materiality and process. The canonical novels Leckie addresses wear the “secret” of the housing of the poor on their sleeves—or, on their jackets: Bleak House , Middlemarch...

... to teach us what we now see is carefully expressed in their novels? And certainly, no one could deny it after Hack's elegant demonstrations of how Henry Esmond, Bleak House, No Name, and Daniel Derondn complexly interweave the multiple modalities that today go by the narne of materiality...

... nineteenth century to Ian McEwan’s Atonement in the late twentieth century. (Chapters are dedicated in between to Dickens’s Bleak House, Forster’s A Passage to India, Woolf’s The Waves, and Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, and a coda moves beyond the novel to examine Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane.) Jackson...

... that interest Arac is a form of dia- lectical memory, a refusal of censure and exclusion. Thus, in Little Dorrit, “Dickens keeps always in sight the pathology of the high Victorian moment,” and “Bleak House is full of both disease and mysterious spirits” (37, 85). The pathology is the distortion many...

... about the opinions of the others in their world. There is Peepy in Bleak House , who proudly shows off his wounded knees when he falls down the stairs, and who peacefully slumbers and spares himself the supposed “pain of separation” when he is lost for over an hour in Newgate (54...

... irreversibly disillusioned with human beings, is the appropriate response not something like a resigned sigh or a sad shake of the head, rather than—of all things—a novel? It is not that I have trouble believing that Hardy’s outlook on the human race was bleak. After all, this is the man who...

..., like those of the modem police, are in Britain's imperial projects, as well as in attempts to rethink the nature of state power. As she shows in Chapter 2, "the first fully-imagined English detective is not found in Bleak House or Baker Street, but rather in India" (22). It was the suppression...

... by the time of Bleak House . Everyone, it seems, was a collector, to the extent that such collection and its significance for particular scenes and textual moments have so far largely eluded critical attention. The book's first chapter describes the way Dickens's reviewers made use of “gallery language...