| Supposing",Bleak House", is an extendedmeditation on what many consider to be Dickens's and nineteenth-century England'sgreatest work of narrative fiction. Focusing on the novel's retrospective narrator, whom heidentifies as Esther Woodcourt in order to distinguish her from her younger, unmarried self, JohnJordan offers provocative new readings of the novel's narrative structure, its illustrations,its multiple and indeterminate endings, the role of its famous detective, Inspector Bucket, its manyghosts, and its relation to key events in Dickens's life during the years 1850 to1853.Jordan draws on insights from narratology and psychoanalysis in order toexplore multiple dimensions of Esther's complex subjectivity and fractured narrative voice. His conclusion considers Bleak House as a national allegory, situating it in the context of thetroubled decade of the 1840s and in relation to Dickens's seldom-studied AChild's History of England (written during the same years as his great novel) and toJacques Derrida's Specters of Marx. Supposing",BleakHouse", claims Dickens as a powerful investigator of the unconscious mind and as a",popular", novelist deeply committed to social justice and a politics ofinclusiveness. Victorian Literature and CultureSeries |
