Bleak House Links

"Bleak House:
Public and Private Worlds"  An essay by Shirley Galloway,
instructor of English literature and composition at College of San Mateo whose
thesis reads: "The suggestion of synthesis (between the two narratives in
Bleak House) is intriguing and I will conclude with a speculative look at
what the novel has to say about 'life as a mystery that must be discovered', the
function of revelation in the text, and the possibility of either social or
individual transformation within this fictional world."

"The
Skimpole Syndrome: Childhood Unlimited"  by Paul V. Mankowski, from the
journal First Thing- the Journal of Religion and Public Life uses the
character of Skimpole as a "type" that can be found in modern Christianity - the
eternal child who revels in the importance and innocence of the self, and
possesses a sense of bafflement at the structures the world (or the Church)
impose on them.

"Appreciations and Criticism" by G.K. Chesterton (1911) - Chapter
15, available here, discusses Bleak House as Dickens' most "mature" novel. 
Not his best, necessarily, but his most mature and delicately nuanced.

"The
Immortal Dickens" by George Gissing (1929) - Chapter 10 of Gissing's work is
devoted to a very opinionated critical analysis of Bleak House,

both its flaws and its charms, and a description of the
events surrounding the text's creation

"Consequential Ground: The Foot
Passengers of Bleak House" - a lecture given by Steven Connor of
Birkbeck College, London, that examines the role of ambulators in Bleak House's
narrative and how the manner in which characters are described moving reflects,
to a decent extent, their role in Victorian society.

"Bleak House and Little Dorrit: Iconography of Darkness"   -
Chapter 6 of Michael Steig's Dickens and Phiz, available through the
Victorian Web project

"Challenging figures: Three of Charles Dickens' Marginal Women" - by Valerie
Kennedy, Faculty of Humanities and Letters, Bilkent University; Ankara, Turkey,
available through the Victorian Web project, this article examines Hortense as
one of three marginalized women in Dickens' various works.

"Bleak House
and the Reign of Metaphor" - by Eiichi Hara - Argues that Bleak
House's metaphors are generally too obvious and unambiguous to be very good,
and that their rigidity undermines their power as satirical devices. 
Whatever.

"Bleak
House and Brown's Work: A Gaze upon the Poor" by Takashi
Nakamura - Explores Dickens' presentation of the poor and the powers that
control them, and his awareness of the concept of "public health"

"Bleak House: the
Literary Imagination and Contemporary Housing Policy" - By Tony Manzi -
Examines the role of literature and pop culture in forming housing policy; uses
some of Dickens' works as examples

"Bartleby the Scrivener

and Bleak House: Melville's Debt to Dickens" - by David Jaffe -
Argues that Melville's Bartleby tale owes some of its scrivener characters to
Bleak House, and draws particular attention to the similarities between the
character of Nemo/Harlowe and the mysterious Bartelby

"Differing Opinions: Contemporary Reviews of Bleak House" - By Lowela
Lacson, Susan Hocker, Elizabeth Phan, and Heather Shanks;  An exploration
of published critical opinion contemporary to the Dickens' release of Bleak
House

"Chapter 4. David Copperfield and Bleak House: On Dividing the
Responsibility of Knowing" - from Audrey Jaffe's Vanishing Points:
Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience - Takes a look at the nature of
Dickens' dual narrative style in Bleak House and the effect of Esther's
constant self-effacement as a narrative technique

Amazon.com and

Barnes and Noble Reader Book Reviews of Bleak House - Say what you will, but
sites like these let you know what the people are thinking.  Power to the
people, especially the 7th graders.

"The Marginal, the Equitable, and the Unparalleled: Lady Dedlock's Case in
Dickens's Bleak House" (Subscription to Project Muse
required, sorry)An article from New Literary History by Dieter Paul
Polloczek,
author of 1993's heralded "Vernetzungsstrukturen: Faulkner, Pynchon, Barthelme" 

- This article claims that older texts require re-examination, for reasons that
would require an entire web page unto itself to explain, and takes Dickens'
Bleak House as its sample re-examination text.  Requires a fat, fat
vocabulary to understand it.

"Market
Indicators: Banking and Domesticity in Dickens's Bleak House" - (Subscription
to Project Muse required, sorry) by
Gordon Bigelow - Discusses Dickens's evaluation of England's economic systems
through the Central Bank and the family home....

"Sublimation
strange": Allegory and Authority in Bleak House" - By Daniel Hack
(Subscription to Project Muse required, sorry) -
Concerns itself with Dickens' attempt to relate the functionality of allegory
to narrative forms....