HARRY AND OLIVER: AN EXAMPLE OF (UNCANNY) INTERTEXTUALITY

This intense Harry Potter period of my life seems never to end… I’m currently teaching Oliver Twist to my Victorian Literature class on the usual pretence that they have all read the book and can follow my analysis. Well. Since they need to learn how to write a paper, I explained to them what a […]

THE MANY LIVES OF THE ARTFUL DODGER

I have finally read Terry Pratchett’s Dodger (2012), a novel oddly marketed as young adult fiction and, yes, closely related to Dickens’ Oliver Twist. I was going to write a post specifically on it but, when checking Wikipedia for more information (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodger_(novel)), I’ve come across a strange literary phenomenon: the recent resurrection of Jack Dawkins, […]

LEARNING TO BE LESS AFRAID OF THE NARRATOR…

This post is, particularly, for our second-year Victorian Literature students who must be this week hurrying up to finish their paper proposals and thus meet the 18th November deadline. They have been asked to write a paper (1,500 words with three secondary sources) on the narrator(s) in either Oliver Twist or The Tenant of Wildfell […]

INFINITE LAYERS TO THE CAKE: SOMETHING ELSE ON OLIVER TWIST AND THE DEATH PENALTY

Re-reading for the umpteenth time Oliver Twist I finally paid attention to something I’d ignored in the prologue by Philip Horner to the Penguin Classics edition (2002). This refers to Dickens’ publicly expressed opinions on capital punishment and how they should colour our reading of Fagin’s paradoxically unseen public execution. Intriguingly, both Dickens and William […]

BETWEEN THE NOVEL AND THE ESSAY: THE FALL OF BARCELONA, 1714

I was showing my city, Barcelona, to a friend from Madrid almost 20 years ago and when I explained that the Ciutadella (the Citadel) had been built to humiliate the city inhabitants after the Castilian takeover of 1714, he asked in surprise, “What do you mean ‘Castilian takeover’?”. Gosh, did I get that wrong at […]

MORE ABUSED WOMEN… IN NOVELS BY MEN

An MA student, Rubén, asks me to supervise his dissertation on Richard Yates’s 1961 novel Revolutionary Road –a novel I promised myself not to touch ever after seeing the film adaptation (because of its very ugly plot). Yet, what can I do? I like his proposal to consider 1950s masculinity and so… I must read […]

CHARLES AND MARIANO JOSÉ: A ZEST FOR (CITY) LIFE

A ridiculous moment in Dickens’s ‘paper’ (as he calls them) on a charity dinner in his Sketches by Boz (1836-37) provokes a strong sense of dèja vú. Soon I identify it with a memory of reading Mariano José de Larra’s articles back when I was a secondary-school student and again as an undegrad. Suddenly, I […]

OLIVER’S BASTARDY: BEYOND THE WORKHOUSE AND INTO THE LAW

Typically, there comes a point when after reading a particular book six or seven times, a new angle opens up and I wonder how come I’d missed that. In the case of Dickens’s Oliver Twist perhaps this has much to do with having overlooked the details of the rocambolesque explanation of the connection between the […]