The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Author(s):  
Peter Orford
Keyword(s):  

Dickens’s last and incomplete novel has generated a remarkable number of theories regarding the missing end. This chapter explores the ways in which responses to the novel have evolved, dividing them broadly into four groups: the opportunists, the detectives, the academics, and the irreverent. It explores the solutions for their implicit criticism regarding how The Mystery of Edwin Drood should be interpreted, examining the conflicting ideas which have arisen about what genre the book falls into, or what other works it most closely resembles. It closes with a call to recognize and celebrate the comedy in Edwin Drood as a necessary balance to the prolonged morbid fascination with the final book of Dickens.

2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (8) ◽  
pp. S33-S33
Author(s):  
Wenchao Ou ◽  
Haifeng Chen ◽  
Yun Zhong ◽  
Benrong Liu ◽  
Keji Chen

Author(s):  
Fabrice B. R. Parmentier ◽  
Pilar Andrés

The presentation of auditory oddball stimuli (novels) among otherwise repeated sounds (standards) triggers a well-identified chain of electrophysiological responses: The detection of acoustic change (mismatch negativity), the involuntary orientation of attention to (P3a) and its reorientation from the novel. Behaviorally, novels reduce performance in an unrelated visual task (novelty distraction). Past studies of the cross-modal capture of attention by acoustic novelty have typically discarded from their analysis the data from the standard trials immediately following a novel, despite some evidence in mono-modal oddball tasks of distraction extending beyond the presentation of deviants/novels (postnovelty distraction). The present study measured novelty and postnovelty distraction and examined the hypothesis that both types of distraction may be underpinned by common frontally-related processes by comparing young and older adults. Our data establish that novels delayed responses not only on the current trial and but also on the subsequent standard trial. Both of these effects increased with age. We argue that both types of distraction relate to the reconfiguration of task-sets and discuss this contention in relation to recent electrophysiological studies.


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