Open Guides To Literature: Bleak House

Bleak House is an infuriating, moving, puzzling, funny, passionate, polemical novel. The aim of this Guide is to help readers respond to the pleasure and challenges -intellectual, affective, aesthetic -offered by this text. It encourages active reader involvement to achieve a full sense of the novel's linguistic and comic vitality, its multiple voices, and its topicality through guided close reading of specific passages it examines formal aspects such as realism, characterisation, structure, narrative point of view, and themes. A further feature of the Guide is a carefully graded introduction to recent critical thinking so that by the time these new approaches are discussed explicitly in the final chapter, Guide readers are fully equipped to understand and enter into debate with current critical theory, including the work of feminist, marxist, and deconstructionist critics and the ideas of Bakhtin, Althusser, Lacan, Kristeva, Fish and Iser.