http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/29304855

Dickens, women, and language

Characterizes Dicken's novelistic language by relating it to linguistic representations of women in contemporary non-fictional works (handbooks on womanly conduct, documentary works on prostitution, and Florence Nightingale's Cassandra). This analysis reveals that Dickens' individual account of the womanly ideal is shot through with contradiction. Fallen women are both disgraced and valuable, worthless and powerful; "ideal" women are desirable and undesirable, passive and yet destructive of the very social structure they are supposed to sustain. The book's conclusion is that the ambiguous struggle between convention and dissent in the language Dicken's uses for representing women charges his novels with their uneasy excitement and power.

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