Charles Dickens's Great Expectations

With Great Expectations, Dickens applied his bravura storytelling abilities to a familiar subject for a novelist: a young person's coming of age. Over the course of the novel, Pip struggles to define himself and to make his way through a world populated by escaped convicts, cruel guardians, and the unforgettable Miss Havisham, the jilted bride trapped in the disappointments and regrets of the past. Introduced by esteemed critic Harold Bloom, this new edition offers a selection of full-length critical essays on Dickens's classic exploration of identity and belonging. Pip is the most inward of all Dickens's major character, and except for Esther Summerson in Bleak House, he also appears to be the Dickens protagonist most overtly affected by his own pathos. In Particular, he has a tendency to feel excessively guilly, almost in the Kafkan mode.---Harold Bloom. By the end of Great Expectations, it may even be unclear whether it is Biddy or Estella who has all along been the most conventional mate for Pip, so plausible do both options appear. Dickens skillfully throws the conventional ending into question by explicitly including it while showing that it functions as only one alternative among several.---Caroline Levine. Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations, a series of more than 100 volumes, presents the best current criticism on the most widely read and studied poems, novels, and dramas of the Western world, from Oedipus Rex and The Iliad to such modern and contemporary works as William Faulkner's the Sound and the Fury and Don DeLillo's White Noise. Each volume opens with an introductory essay and editor's note by Harold Bloom and includes a bibliography, a chronology of the writer's life and works, and notes on the contributors. Taken together, Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations provides a comprehensive critical guide to the most vital and influential works of the Western literary tradition.