Great Expectations

"Written in the last decades of Dickens's life, Great Expectations (1860-1861) was widely praised and universally admired. It was his last great novel and many critics believe it to be his finest. Readers and critics alike praised it for its masterful plot and its three-dimensional, psychologically realistic characters. To Algernon Charles Swinburne, the novel was unparalleled in all of English fiction, with defects ""as nearly imperceptible as spots on the sun or shadow on a sunlit sea"" and G. B. Shaw found it Dickens"" ""most compactly perfect book."" This fully annotated edition invites readers to savour Dickens's timeless masterpiece which tells an unflaggingly suspenseful story of aspirations and moral redemption of orphaned Pip. In tracing Pip's rise from an apprentice at Joe's forge to a London gentleman, the novel unfolds a gripping narrative of guilt, love, revenge, and reward that moves across varied rural and urban landscapes in and around nineteenth century London This volume is a collection of lively and diverse essays on plot symbolism. class, gender, and sexuality in Dickens Great Expectations. The critical introduction to this edition aims at acquainting the reader with five different contemporary theoretical perspectives of importance for an understanding of this classic novel of Dickens, Contributing writers' essays are taken from a wide variety of sources that discuss the various aesthetic and thematic aspects of Great Expectations in detail. MNIVEDITA BASU teaches English at Kirori Mal College, University of Delhi"