Dicken's Great Expectations

Reader's Guides provide a comprehensive starting point for any advanced student, giving an overview of the context, criticism and influence of key works. Each guide also offers students fresh critical insights and provides a practical introduction to close reading and to analysing literary language and form. They provide up-to-date, authoritative but accessible guides to the most commonly studied classic texts. *Great Expectations* (1861) is not only one of the last great novels to be written by Dickens but is also one which centres around his primary themes: the importance of childhood in relationship to adult life, concepts of guilt and imprisonment and an analysis of individualism as opposed to the increasing bureaucracy of nineteenth-century England. This guide is an ideal introduction to the text including its contexts, Dickens's style and imagery, its critical reception from the time of publication to the present, a guide to illustrated editions and film adaptations and a guide to further reading.