Twemlow's Abyss

The paper demonstrates that Dickens's Our Mutual Friend complicates any attempt to differentiate between aesthetic enjoyment and social awareness in reader response. It isolates three models of reading in which the interconnection between aesthetic effect and consciousness-raising effect is associated with the entanglements between person and thing, animate and inanimate, living and dead, subject and object of perception. These entanglements destabilize the grounds on which we would usually differentiate between aesthetic pleasure and social critique.