FYS536

How does a "great" novel come to be, and how does our sense of its worth and limitations change over time? What factors - personal, cultural, material - lead to its creation and recreation? Students examine Charles Dickens's 1860-1861 novel in its original, weekly format, consider its immediate contexts, its alternative endings, and its recreations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in such works of fiction as Peter Carey's Jack Maggs (1997), Lloyd Jones's Mr. Pip (2006), and Ronald Frame's Havisham (2012), and in film adaptations. In the process, they consider the changing significance of a Victorian "classic."