Criticism > Short Story Criticism > A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens - J. Hillis Miller (essay date 1993)

A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens - J. Hillis Miller (essay date 1993)

J. Hillis Miller (essay date 1993)

SOURCE: “The Genres of A Christmas Carol,” in Dickensian, Vol. 89, No. 3, Winter, 1993, pp. 193–203.

[In the following essay, Miller offers a stylistic analysis of A Christmas Carol.]

I had meant to ask some solemn questions about the genre or genres of A Christmas Carol. Re-reading it has put all that out of my mind. As is always the case for me when I read anything by Dickens, the inordinate linguistic exuberance of A Christmas Carol makes all formal questions seem beside the point. I shall return to the question of genre by way of its relation to this exuberance. First, however, what can be said about Dickens's linguistic virtuosity beyond calling it ‘inimitable’? Perhaps all that can be done is to put ‘Wow!’ in the margin of the text or adjacent to a citation. Such marginal comments, I am told, have formed an important part of Chinese literary commentary through the...

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