Product Description

Each Norton Critical Edition includes an authoritative text, contextual and source materials, and a wide range of interpretations-from contemporary perspectives to the most current critical theory-as well as a bibliography and a chronology of the author's life and work.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9626 in Books
• Published on: 1999-01-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 748 pages

Review
Both a brilliant contribution to scholarship and an excellent reading edition with helpful notes and secondary material: -- Fred Kaplan, City University of New York Graduate Center

Edgar Rosenberg has brilliantly demonstrated that there is no need to be boring in order to be serious. -- Sylvere Monod, University of Paris-Sorbonne

I think the Norton Great Expectations is an editorial masterpiece. No one who teaches this novel or presumes to study it ... should hereafter select any other edition. [Rosenberg's] breathtaking allusions to other monuments of Western culture stretch readers to wider horizons and more comprehensive judgments of Dickens's place in our literary heritage. -- Robert L. Patten, Rice University

Rosenberg is the wittiest and sprightliest of Dickensian commentators, so his editorial matter, lightly carrying a heavy load of scholarship, is a joy to read. -- Philip Collins, University of Leicester

This is a magisterial work, absolutely stuffed with superb scholarship, wonderful quips, and massive common sense. -- David Paroissien, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

This monumental edition ... is destined to be seen as a landmark. .. a benchmark against which all future editions are to be measured. -- Michael Hollington, University of New South Wales

[Rosenberg's editorial] work is immensely learned, and yet the learning is carried with a delightful delicacy and penetration . . .. Game, set, and match to Rosenberg. -- Robin Gilmour, University of Aberdeen

About the Author
A native of Germany, Edgar Rosenberg received his Ph.D. at Stanford University and since 1965 as been Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He is the author of From Shylock to Svengali and some fifty pieces of short fiction, translations, and articles in journals ranging from Esquire to Commentary to The Dickensian. He has taught at San Jose State College and Harvard University, has been Visiting Professor at Stanford University and the University of Haifa, and has received Guggenheim, Fulbright, Bread Loaf, and Stanford Fiction Fellowships as well as the Clark Distinguished Teaching Award at Cornell.

Customer Reviews

One of the Greatest Novels Ever Written
Why do I come here to "review" this? It isn't anyone's book club selection, no. But tonight I want to talk about this incomparably rich and wonderful book, and how as a fourteen year old kid I simply sank into it, taking it slowly week by week, glorying in its mysteries, its great grotesque portrait of Miss Havisham in her rotting bridal finery, its often painful recounting of a young boy's awakening to a seductive world beyond the blacksmith's forge to which destiny has condemned him. This book was about me. It was about wanting to learn, wanting to transcend, wanting to achieve while anything and everything seems hopelessly beyond one's dreams. Of course life changes for Pip. And the world Pip enters was a world that dazzled me and only made my adolescent ambitions burn all the more hurtfully. I think this book is about all who've ever tried for more, ever reached for the gold ring -- and it's about some, of course, who've gotten it. It's also a wondrous piece of storytelling, a wondrous example of how in the first person ("I am, etc." ) a character can tell you more about himself than he himself knows. What a feat. And a very strange thing about this book, too, was the fact that Dickens said more about Pip and Pip's dreams than Dickens knew he was doing. Dickens himself didn't quite realize, I don't think, the full humanity of the character he created. Yet the character is there -- alive, captivating, engaging us throughout with full sympathy. Go for it. If you never read anything else by Charles Dickens, read and experience this book. Afterwards, David Copperfield will be a ride in the sunshine, I assure you. And both books will stand by you forever. For whom am I writing this? For myself perhaps just because Pip meant and still means so much. For some one perhaps who's unsure about this book and needs a push to dive into a classic. Oh, is this book ever worth the effort. -. Enough. Read it, know it.

Norton Critical strikes again
The folks at Norton Critical Editions have once again put together an excellent book, with incredibly helpful notes and interesting articles to help readers understand and appreciate the text.

If you are going to buy some version of Great Expectations, buy this one.

Great Expectations
Pip,a poor orphan boy living with his sister and her husband, who is the village blacksmith, wishes for the new world to live life of a gentlemen in. As if an answer to his wishes, Pips learns from Mr. Jagger that he has been given an enormous quantity of money from a secret benefctor, this money is enough to live the life of a wealthy gentlemen in London. There he stayes with Herbert Pockt. When he sees Estella the girl of his dreams, the adopted girl of the rich, Miss Havisham. To find out who his benefactor and what happenes with Estelaa you have to read this truely great story for it is called "Great" "Expectatons."