Enumeration and Exhaustion: Taking Inventory in "The Old Curiosity Shop"
Name
Buzard Enumeration and Exhaustion for DSA with copyedits.pdf
Size
183.72 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Buzard, James
Date Issued
2008
Journal
Dickens Studies Annual
Publisher
Penn State University Press
Citation
Buzard, James. 'Enumeration and Exhaustion: Taking Inventory in "The Old Curiosity Shop".' Dickens Studies Annual 39 (2008): 17-41 © 2008 AMS Press, Incorporated
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
The Old Curiosity Shop marks a crisis in Dickens’s early career. Overcommitted to projects, a victim of his own success, Dickens soon found his episodic model of fiction, first practiced in Pickwick and devoted to furnishing ‘‘a constant succession of characters and incidents,’’ pushed to its limit. Of his new periodical Master Humphrey’s Clock he complained, ‘‘wind, wind, wind, always winding I am.’’ His fourth novel became a metafictional reflection on the conditions of his own creativity, a work seemingly intent on thwarting the very delineating power—the power of invention, and of inventory—that multiplies fresh characters and incidents in the Dickensian episodic narrative.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://dickens.ucsc.edu/resources/dsa/vol-39.html
