( Bleak House, I should say, is also a 20th century novel in its way: the novel as city-system and language-system for readers of Joyce and Pynchon.) By contrast, Great Expectations, written on the threshold of late middle age, with its short swift chapters, its relative brevity, and its lyrical look back in the chastened first person over a disappointed life, will satisfy tastes trained on The Great Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises. The longer, looser novels of his early and middle period- Oliver Twist, for example, or David Copperfield-come down from the rambling and rumbustious 18th-century novel, from Defoe and Fielding. I credit Dickens’s move, toward the end of his career, from monthly to weekly serialization for the novel’s success with modern readers. The author’s penultimate finished novel, Great Expectations (1861) was the introductory Dickens novel of choice for many late 20th century readers-particularly American high schoolers, who often encountered 19th-century English fiction first through this novel.
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