When William Thackeray, Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell began their writing careers in the 1830s, they chose to write literary sketches, adopting a popular short form that emphasized description and essayistic analysis rather than storytelling. In this unusual study of a previously neglected literary form, Amanpal Garcha shows how the literary sketch influenced these authors' careers, transformed the marketplace for fiction and led to the development of some of the Victorian novel's key formal and ideological elements.

This book shows how the literary sketch influenced the careers of William Thackeray, Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell.

About the Author
Amanpal Garcha is Associate Professor of English at Ohio State University.

Reviews
"In examining Washington Irving, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Edgar Allan Poe, Garcha sees the sketch, no longer dismissed in favor of the novel, as providing a warrant for the formal fragmentation of Walter Pater and tacitly for modernism and poststructuralism. Garcha's methodological acuteness is a sign that Victorian studies is waking from its empirico-historicist slumber and moving into a more intellectually confident mode. Summing Up: Recommended." -N. Birns, The New School, CHOICE



Book Information
ISBN 9780521513586
Author Amanpal Garcha
Format Hardback
Page Count 294
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 600g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 21mm