With its sustained social criticism and complex construction, Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853) is considered by many critics to be Dickens's most remarkable novel.
Janice Allan offers a starting point for those new to Dickens's weighty text and the daunting body of critical work that surrounds it. This literary sourcebook:
*introduces the contextual issues that most directly influenced Dickens's writing and reprints relevant source documents
*provides a comprehensive survey of the criticism of Bleak House from publication to the present, then introduces, reprints and annotates extracts from significant critical texts
*discusses key passages of the text, which are reprinted and fully annotated for ease of use
*includes cross-references throughout the Sourcebook, making illuminating connections between the text, contexts and interpretations of the novel
*concludes the volume with suggestions to further reading, enabling additional focused study
Both accessible and informative, this Sourcebook is an invaluable guide to one of the nineteenth century's most important and frequently studied novels.

Series Information:
Routledge Literary Sourcebooks

Sherlock Holmes is the most famous fictional detective in history, with a popularity that has never waned since catching the imagination of his late-Victorian readership. This Companion explores Holmes' popularity and his complex relationship to the late-Victorian and modernist periods; on one hand bearing the imprint of a range of Victorian anxieties and preoccupations, while on the other shaping popular conceptions of criminality, deviance, and the powers of the detective. This collection explores these questions in three parts. 'Contexts' explores late-Victorian culture, from the emergence of detective fiction to ideas of evolution, gender, and Englishness. 'Case Studies' reads selected Holmes adventures in the context of empire, visual culture, and the gothic. Finally, 'Holmesian Afterlives' investigates the relationship between Holmes and literary theory, film and theatre adaptations, new Holmesian novels, and the fandom that now surrounds him.

Sherlock Holmes is the most famous fictional detective in history, with a popularity that has never waned since catching the imagination of his late-Victorian readership. This Companion explores Holmes' popularity and his complex relationship to the late-Victorian and modernist periods; on one hand bearing the imprint of a range of Victorian anxieties and preoccupations, while on the other shaping popular conceptions of criminality, deviance, and the powers of the detective. This collection explores these questions in three parts. 'Contexts' explores late-Victorian culture, from the emergence of detective fiction to ideas of evolution, gender, and Englishness. 'Case Studies' reads selected Holmes adventures in the context of empire, visual culture, and the gothic. Finally, 'Holmesian Afterlives' investigates the relationship between Holmes and literary theory, film and theatre adaptations, new Holmesian novels, and the fandom that now surrounds him.