Dickens's Great Expectations

Destined to become one of the most important analyses of Great Expectations, this carefully researched book is recommended.

~Choice

Meckier insightfully argues that, in Great Expectations, Dickens was consciously rewriting novels by Lever, Thackeray, Collins, Shelley, and Charlotte and Emily Bronte, as well as Dickens's own David Copperfield.... Contains an impressive amount of excellent material.

~Deborah Thomas

Establishes Dickens as a profound social thinker in Great Expectations, one whose thought is never abstract but mediated through language, character, and narrative, through aesthetic demands of form in the widest sense.

~Dickens Quarterly

Incisive, intelligent, spirited, and cogently argued.... A wholly valid close reading of Dickens's great novel.

~Elliot Engel

Meckier compiles compelling evidence to support his categorization of Great Expectations as a parody of and response to what he deemed unrealistic portrayals of Victorian culture using, or misusing, the trope of Cinderella.

~English Literature in Transition

Focuses on what is arguably Dickens's finest novel.

~Victorian Newsletter

Meckier's astonishing finesse as a close reader is happily instructive.

~Victorian Studies

A thorough reevaluation of the ways in which Charles Dickens employed fairy tale plots late in his career.

~Virginia Quarterly Review