Supposing Bleak House

(University of Virginia Press) Jordan focuses on Dickens’ Bleak House, looking at, among other things, its narrative structure, illustrations, endings, ghosts, and relation to key events in Dickens’ life during the years 1850 to 1853. Using ideas from narratology and psychoanalysis, Jordan investigates the narrator, Esther Woodcourt, and concludes that Bleak House is a national allegory, situating it in relation to the decade of the 1840s. Jordan is a professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and director of the Dickens Project.