Description: For the first time in a single volume: comprehensive overviews and concise analyses of the key critical texts and approaches to the most-studied works of literature. By assembling a wide-ranging collection of extracts from essays, reviews, and articles, these smart and sophisticated study guides provide students with ready access to the most important secondary writings on one or more texts by a given writer.

Each volume:
-- offers a balanced and nuanced approach to criticism, drawing on a wide array of British and American sources;
-- explains criticism in terms of key approaches, allowing students to grasp the central issues in each work;
-- is edited by a noted scholar who specializes in the writer or work;
-- includes notes and a comprehensive bibliography, and index.

Surveying the key debates about a novel which has provoked an immensely rich critical response, the extracts and essays included here examine Great Expectations in structural, symbolic, social, political, psychological, a sexual terms, relating the novel to its own time and to a range of twentieth-century theoretical perspectives. Exploring secondary sources, from initial reviews in the 1860s to the most up-to-date critiques of the 1990s, the Guide is an essential resource for the study of one of Dickens's most complex works.

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