Charles Dickens's experience and imagining of creativity is at the heart of his self-awareness, subject-matter and narrative. His intelligence works intuitively rather than conceptually and ideas about imagination often emerge informally in personal letters and implicitly through characters, language and story. His self-analysis and reflexive tendency are embedded in his styles and forms of narrative and dialogue, images of normality, madness, extremity, subversion and disorder, poetry and inter-textuality, anticipating and shaping the languages of modernism, influencing James Joyce and Virginia Woolf as well as traditionalists like H.G. Wells and Evelyn Waugh. Discussing Dickens's novels and some of his letters, sketches, essays and stories, Barbara Hardy offers a fascinating demonstration of creativity. Table of Contents AcknowledgmentsEditions and Works CitedPreface1. A Career and its Context2. Dickens discusses Creativity3. Awareness of Art in Sketches By Boz, Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Barnaby Rudge, The Old Curiosity Shop, A Christmas Carol and The Chimes4. The Artist as Narrator in Doctor Marigold, David Copperfield, Bleak House and Great Expectations5. Talkative Men and Women6. Imaginative Extremes, Norms and Negations7. Subversions and Oppositions8. Crises of Imagination9. Forecast and Fantasy in Little Dorrit10. Creative Conversation in Hard Times, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend11. Assertions of Style: Rhythm and Repetition in A Tale of Two Cities and Our Mutual Friend12. Dialogues with Shakespeare in David Copperfield and Great Expectations13. Dickens in the Twentieth CenturyIndex