It is in "Bleak House" that Dickens the realist and Dickens the modernist are often thought to meet. The essays collected in this "New Casebook" embody some of the approaches to Dickens, using deconstructive, feminist, Marxist and post-structuralist methods.

It is in "Bleak House" that Dickens the realist and Dickens the modernist are often thought to meet. In the two intertwined but separate narratives, one from a woman's perspective and the other forming, arguably, the first detective novel in English, Dickens confronts modern England and modernity itself. The essays collected in this "New Casebook" embody some of the approaches to Dickens, using deconstructive, feminist, Marxist and post-structuralist methods. The introduction places the various essays in the context of current critical thinking, whilst itself suggesting an alternative viewpoint and the potential direction of future analysis of this text.

Acknowedgements - General Editor's Preface - Introduction
J.Tambling - Interpretation in Bleak House
J.Hillis Miller - 'The Universe Makes an Indifferent Parent': Bleak House and the Victorian Family Romance
C.van Boheemen-Saaf - Double Vision and the Double Standard in Bleak House: A Feminist Perspective
V.Blain - Discipline in Different Voices: Bureaucracy, Police, Family and Bleak House
D.A.Miller - Ideology and Critique in Dickens'sBleak House
D.Lacapra - Telescopic Philanthropy: Professionalism and Responsibility in Bleak House
B.Robbins - David Copperfield and Bleak House: On Dividing the Responsibility of Knowing
A.Jaffe - Re-ReadingBleak House: The Chronicle of a 'Little Body' and its Perverse Defence
K.Cummings - Esther's Will
T.Peltason - Losing One's Place: Displacement and Domesticity in Dicken's Bleak House
K.McLaughlin - Notes on the Contributors - Index