Selected Critical Articles (PDFs)
On Great Expectations:
- Brooks, Peter. “Repetition, Repression, and Return: Great Expectations and the Study of Plot” Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.
- Freedgood, Elaine. “Realism, Fetishism, and Genocide: ‘Negro Head’ Tobacco in and Around Great Expectations.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 36.1 (2002): 26–41.
- Houston, Gail Turley. “‘Pip’ and ‘Property’: The (Re)production of the Self in Great Expectations.” Studies in the Novel 24.1 (1992): 13-25.
- Walsh, Susan. “Bodies of Capital: Great Expectations and the Climacteric Economy.” Victorian Studies 37.1 (1993): 73-98.
- Woloch, Alex. “Partings Welded Together: The Character-System in Great Expectations.” The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. 177-243.
The full bibliography can be found here.
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Reading Schedule
Monday, July 22: Chapter 1-12
Tuesday, July 23: Chapters 13-24
Wednesday, July 24: Chapters 25-36
Thursday, July 25: Chapters 37-48
Friday, July 26: Chapters 49-59
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Topics for Reading and Discussion
While the featured novel will generate many topics for discussion in its own right, the conversations of the Universe week will be shaped largely by the themes mentioned below.
- The child, childhood, and the family
- Criminality and the law; "naterally wicious"; Jaggers’ versions of justice
- Ambitions – Pip’s, Estella’s, Herbert’s, Magwitch’s
- The British Empire and colonialism – with respect to Australia as well as Herbert’s career in “the East”
- Different kinds of wealth – inheritance, salaries, the “fictions” of capital, “portable property”
- The domestic sphere – in its “ideal” form (Joe & Biddy); in its darkest form (Satis House); in its comic/exaggerated form (Wemmick’s house)
- The country vs. the city
- Attempts at self-transformation (Pip, Magwitch), shifting identities, and changing names (Pip, Handel; Magwitch, Provis, Campbell)
- The past’s hold on the present and future (Pip & Magwitch, Miss Havisham)
- Different kinds of labor (Joe’s, Biddy’s, Jaggers’, Magwitch’s work and, initially, Pip and Herbert’s lack of labor)
- The lingering power of the aristocracy (Mrs. Pocket’s fantasies of inherited status) vs. “modern” attempts to move up social ranks
- Animality and the animal
- The ABCs: literacy, writing, reading, adding and subtracting
- Retrospective narration: the "two Pips"
- Psychosomatic symptoms: mind/body problems
