Article: Dicken's 'Bleak House' and Norris's 'McTeague.' (Charles Dickens; Frank Norris)

In the 1890s Frank Norris was part of a movement that began to reclaim Charles Dickens as a positive influence on American literature. For nearly twenty years Dickens had been kept in a critical doghouse by the authorities of Gilded Age realism. (Howells's prejudice against "Dickensian" elements in American fiction can be seen in his review of McTeague.(1)) By defining naturalism as more a romantic than a realistic mode of writing, Norris allowed for "the inclusion of Dickensian elements in American fiction by program as well as by actual performance" (Gardner 70).

Norris absorbed Dickens at his mother's knee, learning early lessons in the handling of narrative ...

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