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Print Price: $10.95

Format:
Paperback
528 pp.
129 mm x 196 mm

ISBN-13:
9780199219766

Publication date:
July 2008

Imprint: OUP UK

Great Expectations

New Edition

Charles Dickens
Edited by Margaret Cardwell and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Series : Oxford World's Classics

'you are to understand, Mr. Pip, that the name of the person who is your liberal benefactor remains a profound secret...'

Young Pip lives with his sister and her husband the blacksmith, with few prospects for advancement until a mysterious benefaction takes him from the Kent marshes to London. Pip is haunted by figures from his past - the escaped convict Magwitch, the time-withered Miss Havisham and her proud and beautiful ward, Estella - and in time uncovers not just the origins of his great expectations but the mystery of his own heart.

A powerful and moving novel, Great Expectations is suffused with Dickens's memories of the past and its grip on the present, and it raises disturbing questions about the extent to which individuals affect each other's lives. This edition includes a lively introduction, Dickens's working notes, the novel's original ending, and an extract from an early theatrical adaptation. It reprints the definitive Clarendon text.

Readership : General readers of Victorian novels, and of Charles Dickens in particular, students of nineteenth-century English literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, the novel.

There is no Table of Contents available at this time.

There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.

Margaret Cardwell is Formerly a Reader in English at the Queen's University, Belfast.

There are no related titles available at this time.

Special Features

Perhaps Dickens's best-loved work, Great Expectations features memorable characters such as the convict Magwitch, the mysterious Miss Havisham and her proud ward Estella, as Pip unravels the mystery of his benefactor and of his own heart. Widely adapted for film and television, the story attracts readers of all ages.
This edition reprints the authoritative text of the Clarendon edition, correcting both original printer's errors and later textual corruptions, and retains facsimiles of the original title-pages for each of the three volumes of the 1861 edition.
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's new introduction ranges widely across critical issues raised by the novel: its biographical genesis; the effect of the past on the present, ideas of origin and progress and what makes a 'gentleman', memory, melodrama, and the book's critical reception.
Four appendices: the original ending to the novel; the different chapter numbering in the serial version; Dickens's working notes; two pages from the theatrical adaptation of the novel made by, or with the approval of, Dickens.
The fullest set of critical notes in any mass-market edition.