Summary: What did Dickens mean to Dostoevsky, and what did the Russian writer owe to England's greatest entertainer? Many of Dickens' readers have recognized that his achievement needs to be compared with Dostoevsky's, and they have suspected, or assumed an influence. This book shows what the literary influence really or probably was.

Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism is Donald Fanger's groundbreaking study of the art of Dostoevsky and the literary and historical context in which it was created. Through detailed analyses of the work of Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol, Fanger identifies romantic realism, the transformative fusion of two generic categories, as a powerful imaginary response to the great modern city. This fusion reaches its aesthetic and metaphysical climax in Dostoevsky, whose vision culminating in Crime and Punishment is seen by Fanger as the final synthesis of romantic realism.

This provocative biography tells the story of how an ambitious young Londoner became England’s greatest novelist. Focused on the 1830s, it portrays a restless, uncertain Dickens who could not decide on a career path. Through twists and turns, the author traces a double transformation: in reinventing himself Dickens reinvented the form of the novel.

Dostoevsky and the Realists: Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy​ offers a radical redefinition of Realism as a historical phenomenon, grounded in the literary manifestoes of the 1840s in three national literary canons (English, French and Russian) which issue a call to writers to record the manners and mores of their societies for posterity and thus to become "local historians." The sketch of manners becomes the instituting genre of Realism but is transformed in the major novels of the Realists into history as genealogy and into a phenomenology of modern subjectivity. Dickens, Flaubert and Tolstoy are brought into relation with Dostoevsky via a shared poetics as well as through a deconstructive and/or psychoanalytic analysis of their respective novels, which are interpreted in the context of various doctrines of Beauty, including Dostoevsky's own artistic credo of 1860. In this broad context of European aesthetics and the European literary canon, Dostoevsky's own view of history is illuminated in a new perspective, in which his concept of the "soil" is stripped of its conservative mask behind which emerges a (post-exile) Dostoevsky with socialist, pan-European views. The portrait of Dostoevsky which thus emerges from the present study is that of a European writer with a radically modern aesthetics and with a progressivist political orientation which is in consonance with his pre-exile affiliation with utopian socialism.

Charles Dickens's 200th birthday will be celebrated in 2012. Though his writings are now more than 100 years old, many remain in print and are avidly read and studied. Often overlooked--or unknown--are the considerable Christian convictions Dickens held and displayed in his work. This book fills that vacuum by examining Dickens the Christian and showing how Christian beliefs and practices permeate his work. This historical work is written for pastors, students, and laity alike. Chapters look at Dickens's life and work topically, arguing that Christian faith was front and center in some of what Dickens wrote (such as his children's work The Life of Our Lord) and saliently implicit throughout various other characters and plots. Since Dickens's Christian side is rarely considered, Gary Colledge illuminates a fresh angle of Dickens, and the 200th birthday makes it especially timely.

Although Russian fiction master Fyodor Dostoyevsky is best known for epic, sprawling novels that detail psychological and philosophical problems in minute detail, his more concise work is also remarkable in its scope and depth. This collection of stories will please fans of classic Russian literature and Dostoyevsky buffs who are interested in sampling the author's forays into another format.

A collection of excerpts from Dostoyevsky's writings, demonstrating his spiritual thoughts and grouped under such headings as "Man's Rebellion Against God" and "Life in God."