Download or read book Dickens His Parables and His Reader written by Linda M. Lewis and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Dickens once commented that in each of his Christmas stories there is “an express text preached on . . . always taken from the lips of Christ.” This preaching, Linda M. Lewis contends, does not end with his Christmas stories but extends throughout the body of his work. In Dickens, His Parables, and His Reader, Lewis examines parable and allegory in nine of Dickens’s novels as an entry into understanding the complexities of the relationship between Dickens and his reader. Through the combination of rhetorical analysis of religious allegory and cohesive study of various New Testament parables upon which Dickens based the themes of his novels, Lewis provides new interpretations of the allegory in his novels while illuminating Dickens’s religious beliefs. Specifically, she alleges that Dickens saw himself as valued friend and moral teacher to lead his “dear reader” to religious truth. Dickens’s personal gospel was that behavior is far more important than strict allegiance to any set of beliefs, and it is upon this foundation that we see allegory activated in Dickens’s characters. Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop exemplify the Victorian “cult of childhood” and blend two allegorical texts: Jesus’s Good Samaritan parable and John Bunyan’s ThePilgrim’s Progress. In Dombey and Son,Dickens chooses Jesus’s parable of the Wise and Foolish Builders. In the autobiographical David Copperfield, Dickens engages his reader through an Old Testament myth and a New Testament parable: the expulsion from Eden and the Prodigal Son, respectively. Led by his belief in and desire to preach his social gospel and broad church Christianity, Dickens had no hesitation in manipulating biblical stories and sermons to suit his purposes. Bleak House is Dickens’s apocalyptic parable about the Day of Judgment, while Little Dorrit echoes the line “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” from the Lord’s Prayer, illustrating through his characters that only through grace can all debt be erased. The allegory of the martyred savior is considered in Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens’s final completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, blends the parable of the Good and Faithful Servant with several versions of the Heir Claimant parable. While some recent scholarship debunks the sincerity of Dickens’s religious belief, Lewis clearly demonstrates that Dickens’s novels challenge the reader to investigate and develop an understanding of New Testament doctrine. Dickens saw his relationship with his reader as a crucial part of his storytelling, and through his use and manipulation of allegory and parables, he hoped to influence the faith and morality of that reader.

Download or read book The Victorian Novel written by Francis O'Gorman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This guide steers students through significant critical responses to the Victorian novel from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day.

Download or read book Dickens and the Broken Scripture written by Janet L. Larson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2008-12-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Dickens and the Broken Scripture, Janet Larson examines the paradoxical role of the Bible in Dickens' novels, from such early works as Oliver Twist and Dombey and Son, in which the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer were drawn upon for the most part as stable sources of reassurance and order, to the far more complex novels of Dickens' maturity, such as Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend. In these later works, biblical allusion performs an increasingly contradictory and dissonant role that brings into question not only the moral character of Victorian society but also the sanctity of received religious traditions. Critics have tended to view Dickens' extensive use of the Bible as a not particularly complex or admirable aspect of his artistry--as a device he used primarily as a means of reassuring and building solidarity with his Victorian public. But as Larson demonstrates, Dickens' use of biblical allusion was as sophisticated and multifaceted as his use of character, narrative, description, and plot. In Dickens' novels, the Bible is a broken book, in need of revitalization and reinterpretation for his time, but also desperately vulnerable to attack from the tempestuous Victorian society of his day.

Download or read book Bibliography of Dickensian Criticism 1836 1974 written by Reginald Charles Churchill and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-30 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Education of the Senses written by Peter Gay and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1999 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Education of the Senses is the first volume in Peter Gay's panoramic study of the European and American middle classes from the 1820s to the outbreak of World War I. Drawing on psychoanalytic insights and a rich array of primary sources, Gay reexamines the sexual behavior and attitudes of the Victorians, overturning a myriad of stereotypes, especially about women. Book jacket.

Download or read book Dickens s Villains written by Juliet John and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2003 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study argues that Dickens' villains embody the crucial fusion between the deviant and theatrical aspects of his writing.

Download or read book Dickens and Popular Entertainment written by Paul Schlicke and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-28 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1985. Dickens was a vigorous champion of the right of all men and women to carefree amusements and dedicated himself to the creation of imaginative pleasure. This book represents the first extended study of this vital aspect of Dickens’ life and work, exploring how he channelled his love of entertainment into his artistry. This study offers a challenging reassessment of Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop and Hard Times. It shows the importance of entertainment to Dickens’ journalism and presents an illuminating perspective on the public readings which dominated the last twelve years of his life. This book will be of interest to students of literature.

Download or read book Modes of Production of Victorian Novels written by N. N. Feltes and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1989-05-15 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this sophisticated application of modern Marxist thought, N. N. Feltes demonstrates the determining influence of nineteenth-century publishing practices on the Victorian novel. His dialectical analysis leads to a comprehensive explanation of the development of capitalist novel production into the twentieth century. Feltes focuses on five English novels: Dickens's Pickwick Papers, Thackeray's Henry Esmond, Eliot's Middlemarch, Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Forster's Howards End. Published at approximately twenty year intervals between 1836 and 1920, they each represent a different first-publication format: part-issue, three-volume, bimonthly, magazine-serial, and single-volume. Drawing on publishing, economic, and literary history, Feltes offers a broad, synthetic explanation of the relationship between the production and format of each novel, and the way in which these determine, in the last instance, the ideology of the text. Modes of Production in Victorian Novels provides a Marxist structuralist analysis of historical events and practices described elsewhere only empirically, and traces their relationship to literary texts which have been analyzed only idealistically, thus setting these familiar works firmly and perhaps permanently into a framework of historic materialism.

Download or read book The Pleasures of Memory written by Sarah Winter and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-03 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the sources of the commonly held presumption that reading literature should make people more just, humane, and sophisticated? Rendering literary history responsive to the cultural histories of reading, publishing, and education, The Pleasures of Memory illuminates the ways in which Dickens’s serial fiction shaped not only the popular practice of reading for pleasure and instruction but also the school subject we now know as “English.” Winter shows how Dickens’s serial fiction instigated specific reading practices by reworking the conventions of religious didactic tracts from which most Victorians learned to read. Incorporating an influential associationist psychology of learning founded on the cumulative functioning of memory, Dickens’s serial novels consistently led readers to reflect on their reading as a form of shared experience. Dickens’s celebrity authorship, Winter argues, represented both a successful marketing program for popular fiction and a cultural politics addressed to a politically unaffiliated, social-activist Victorian readership. As late-nineteenth century educational reforms consolidated British and American readers into “mass” populations served by state school systems, Dickens’s beloved novels came to embody the socially inclusive and humanizing goals of democratic education.

Download or read book Shakespeare and Dickens written by Valerie L. Gager and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-06-06 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 1996 book traces Dickens' interest in Shakespeare through his own reading and performance and through theatrical, literary and artistic sources.

Download or read book Oliver Twist written by Charles Dickens and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2007-10-25 with total page 785 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The power of Dickens is so amazing, that the reader at once becomes his captive' WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY The story of the orphan Oliver, who runs away from the workhouse to be taken in by a den of thieves, shocked readers with its depiction of a dark criminal underworld peopled by vivid and memorable characters - the arch-villain Fagin, the artful Dodger, the menacing Bill Sikes and the prostitute Nancy. Combining elements of Gothic romance, the Newgate novel and popular melodrama, Oliver Twist created an entirely new kind of fiction, scathing in its indictment of a cruel society and pervaded by an unforgettable sense of threat and mystery. Edited with an Introduction and notes by PHILIP HORNE

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1830 1914 written by Joanne Shattock and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-28 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A volume of essays on Victorian themes, genres and authors, aimed at students and lecturers.

Download or read book Time patterns in Later Dickens written by Soultana K. Maglavera and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-06-08 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study offers a series of readings of Dickens's later novels: Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. The discussions of the novels assume the basic distinction between the arrangement of events in their chronological order (story) and their arrangement in the narrative (plot), and are based on Genette's classifications of the various types of anachronies as well as on the more functionally oriented categories of anachronies I myself suggest. The temporal organization of the narratives, in upsetting the sequential order of events in specific ways, invites reflection on the very nature of the notion of causality, which, in turn, is related to two interconnected ideas: that truth is not always to be found by logical reasoning and that appearances do not necessarily convey the truth. Closely related to these ideas is a Christian attitude towards time: both linear and circular forms of time are subsumed and at the same time re-formulated within a Christian vision of time, informed by the basic human feelings of love and compassion.

Download or read book Desire and Domestic Fiction written by Nancy Armstrong and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1990-02-22 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Desire and Domestic Fiction argues that far from being removed from historical events, novels by writers from Richardson to Woolf were themselves agents of the rise of the middle class. Drawing on texts that range from 18th-century female conduct books and contract theory to modern psychoanalytic case histories and theories of reading, Armstrong shows that the emergence of a particular form of female subjectivity capable of reigning over the household paved the way for the establishment of institutions which today are accepted centers of political power. Neither passive subjects nor embattled rebels, the middle-class women who were authors and subjects of the major tradition of British fiction were among the forgers of a new form of power that worked in, and through, their writing to replace prevailing notions of "identity" with a gender-determined subjectivity. Examining the works of such novelists as Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, and the Brontës, she reveals the ways in which these authors rewrite the domestic practices and sexual relations of the past to create the historical context through which modern institutional power would seem not only natural but also humane, and therefore to be desired.

Download or read book Charles Dickens s Our Mutual Friend written by Sean Grass and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even within the context of Charles Dickens's history as a publishing innovator, Our Mutual Friend is notable for what it reveals about Dickens as an author and about Victorian publishing. Marking Dickens's return to the monthly number format after nearly a decade of writing fiction designed for weekly publication in All the Year Round, Our Mutual Friend emerged against the backdrop of his failing health, troubled relationship with Ellen Ternan, and declining reputation among contemporary critics. In his subtly argued publishing history, Sean Grass shows how these difficulties combined to make Our Mutual Friend an extraordinarily odd novel, no less in its contents and unusually heavy revisions than in its marketing by Chapman and Hall, its transformation from a serial into British and U.S. book editions, its contemporary reception by readers and reviewers, and its delightfully uneven reputation among critics in the 150 years since Dickens’s death. Enhanced by four appendices that offer contemporary accounts of the Staplehurst railway accident, information on archival materials, transcripts of all of the contemporary reviews, and a select bibliography of editions, Grass’s book shows why this last of Dickens’s finished novels continues to intrigue its readers and critics.

Download or read book Charles Dickens s Great Expectations written by Mary Hammond and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Great Expectations has had a long, active and sometimes surprising life since its first serialized appearance in All the Year Round between 1 December 1860 and 3 August 1861. In this new publishing and reception history, Mary Hammond demonstrates that while Dickens’s thirteenth novel can tell us a great deal about the dynamic mid-Victorian moment into which it was born, its afterlife beyond the nineteenth-century Anglophone world reveals the full extent of its versatility. Re-assessing generations of Dickens scholarship and using newly discovered archival material, Hammond covers the formative history of Great Expectations' early years, analyses the extent and significance of its global reach, and explores the ways in which it has functioned as literature and stage, TV, film and radio drama from its first appearance to the latest film version of 2012. Appendices include contemporary reviews and comprehensive bibliographies of adaptations and translations. The book is a rich resource for scholars and students of Dickens; of comparative literature; and of publishing, readership, and media history.

Download or read book Charles Dickens Resurrectionist written by Andrew Sanders and published by Springer. This book was released on 1982-09-30 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: