Download or read book Dickens and the Dialectic of Growth written by Badri Raina and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his works, from Oliver Twist to Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens reveals a continuum of artistic as well as social development over a period of four decades. In this highly original study, Badri Raina relates Dickens' novels thoroughly to one another, illuminating the works by seeing them in terms of the author's changing social outlook, personal attitudes, and aesthetic practice. Raina's book will fascinate readers of Dickens, and will serve social historians as well. The unifying point of Raina's study is Dickens' ambivalence toward respectable Victorian bourgeois society; he criticized the bourgeois myths of unbridled success and achievement through aggressive individualism, yet wished to be a great success himself. Raina argues that Dickens projected this personal ambivalence through the creation of key characters and combinations of characters in his novels, creating also a continual movement toward self-awareness and self-criticism. This personal movement, argues Raina, found expression in a steady improvement in the quality of Dickens' art. Two of the most interesting issues in Dickens studies--that of his development as a novelist and that of his mass appeal in combination with towering aesthetic achievement--are both addressed thoroughly in this lucid and highly readable book. By following common threads of plot and character through the novels, Raina demonstrates how Dickens matured both socially and artistically, until in his last finished novel, Our Mutual Friend, social values that were earlier espoused (for instance, in Oliver Twist) were wholly and willingly rejected. Raina's critical procedure illuminates not just the career of a Victorian novelist, but one who embraces, traverses, and evaluates the social climate of a critical period of the nineteenth century.
Download or read book Dickens and the Dialectic of Growth written by Sadri N. Raina and published by . This book was released on with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dramatic Dickens written by Carol H MacKay and published by Springer. This book was released on 1989-05-05 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Dickens Industry written by Laurence W. Mazzeno and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2008 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Undoubtedly the best-selling author of his day and well loved by readers in succeeding generations, Charles Dickens was not always a favorite among critics. Celebrated for his novels advocating social reform, for half a century after his death he was ridiculed by those academics who condescended to write about him. Only the faithful band of devotees who called themselves Dickensians kept alive an interest in his work. Then, during the Second World War, he was resurrected by critics, and was soon being hailed as the foremost writer of his age, a literary genius alongside Shakespeare and Milton. More recently, Dickens has again been taken to task by a new breed of literary theorists who fault his chauvinism and imperialist attitudes. Whether he has been adored or despised, however, one thing is certain: no other Victorian novelist has generated more critical commentary. This book traces Dickens's reputation from the earliest reviews through the work of early 21st-century commentators, showing how judgments of Dickens changed with new standards for evaluating fiction. Mazzeno balances attention to prominent critics from the late 19th century through the first three quarters of the 20th with an emphasis on the past three decades, during which literary theory has opened up new ways of reading Dickens. What becomes clear is that, in attempting to provide fresh insight into Dickens's writings, critics often reveal as much about the predilections of their own age as they do about the novelist. Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University, Reading, Pennsylvania.
Download or read book Railways and Culture in Britain written by Ian Carter and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 19th-century steam railway epitomized modernity's relentlessly onrushing advance. Ian Carter delves into the cultural impact of the train. Why, for example, did Britain possess no great railway novel? He compares fiction and images by canonical British figures (Turner, Dickens, Arnold Bennett) with selected French and Russian competitors: Tolstoy, Zola, Monet, Manet. He argues that while high cultural work on the British steam railway is thin, British popular culture did not ignore it. Detailed discussions of comic fiction, crime fiction, and cartoons reveal a popular fascination with railways tumbling from vast (and hitherto unexplored) stores of critically overlooked genres.
Download or read book Toy Stories written by Vanessa Smith and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2023-09-05 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature explores the stakes of recurrent depictions of children’s violent, damaging, and tenuously restorative play with objects within a long nineteenth century of fictional and educational writing. As Vanessa Smith shows us, these scenes of aggression and anxiety cannot be squared with the standard picture of domestic childhood across that period. Instead, they seem to attest to the kinds of enactments of infant distress we would normally associate with post-psychoanalytic modernity, creating a ripple effect in the literary texts that nest them: regressing developmental narratives, giving new value to wooden characters, exposing Realism’s solid objects to odd fracture, and troubling distinctions between artificial and authentic interiority. Toy Stories is the first study to take these scenes of anger and overwhelm seriously, challenging received ideas about both the nineteenth century and its literary forms. Radically re-conceiving nineteenth-century childhood and its literary depiction as anticipating the scenes, theories, and methodologies of early child analysis, Toy Stories proposes a shared literary and psychoanalytic discernment about child’s play that in turn provides a deep context for understanding both the “development” of the novel and the keen British uptake of Melanie Klein’s and Anna Freud’s interventions in child therapy. In doing so, the book provides a necessary reframing of the work of Klein and Freud and their fractious disagreement about the interior life of the child and its object-mediated manifestations.
Download or read book Philip Larkin s Poetics written by István D. Rácz and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-11-24 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Philip Larkin’s Poetics István D. Rácz offers a reading of Larkin’s credo that systematically discusses the links between his principles and practice – a discussion notably absent up to now from the many studies of this outstanding post-1945 British poet. While Larkin claimed that his poetry did not need any explication, Rácz argues that a careful reading reveals a coherent poetics. This thoroughgoing discussion of the oeuvre provides ample evidence that Larkin’s poetry of interacting opposites creates a logically organized system based on principles to be found in his poetics.
Download or read book Understanding Great Expectations written by George Newlin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2000-03-30 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than one hundred years after being written, Great Expectations is still one of the most widely studied works of fiction. This casebook of historical documents, collateral readings and essays brings to life both Dickens' masterpiece and the social issues surrounding his work. The interdisciplinary approach offers students insight into the historically significant issues, such as child welfare, that ignited Dickens' creative and moral sensibilities. Newlin has unearthed significant documentation on the dilemma of Victorian women, supplying original social commentary such as Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and John Stuart Mill's 1861 The Subjection of Women. This work also addresses the transportation and deportation of convicts with first-hand accounts of the treatment of prisoners. Original materials describing the significance of class distinctions, with demographic data from 1834, point up the socio-economic gaps that stratified Victorian society. Other primary documents describe the physical settings such as the Marsh Country and the river, and Bow Street in London, that figure prominently in Great Expectations. This collection of sources will help broaden students' understanding of Great Expectations and places it within its historical context. A literary analysis chapter introduces students to the important themes and various writing techniques employed by Dickens. Each subsequent chapter offers original essays and explication of historical documents on significant issues. Each section concludes with thought-provoking study questions, topics for research, and lists of suggested readings. This volume will enhance students' reading of this classic and will facilitate further research for student and teacher alike.
Download or read book Victorian Time written by T. Ferguson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-01-17 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian Time examines how literature of the era registers the psychological impact of the onset of a modern, industrialized experience of time as time-saving technologies, such as steam-powered machinery, aimed at making economic life more efficient, signalling the dawn of a new age of accelerated time.
Download or read book Reading Victorian Schoolrooms written by Elizabeth Gargano and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading Victorian Schoolrooms examines the numerous schoolroom scenes in nineteenth-century novels during the fraught era of the Victorian education debates. As Gargano argues, the fiction of mainstream and children’s writers such as Dickens, Brontë, and Carroll reflected widespread Victorian anxieties about the rapid institutionalization of education and the shrinking realm of domestic instruction. As schools increasingly mapped out a schema of time schedules, standardized grades or forms, separate disciplines, and hierarchical architectural spaces, childhood development also came to be seen as regularized and standardized according to clear developmental categories. Yet, Dickens, Brontë, and others did not simply critique or satirize the standardization of school experience. Instead, most portrayed the schoolroom as an unstable site, incorporating both institutional and domestic space. Drawing on the bildungsroman’s traditional celebration of an individualized, experiential education, numerous novels of school life strove to present the novel itself as a form of domestic education, in contrast to the rigors of institutional instruction. By positioning the novel as a form of domestic education currently under attack, these novelists sought to affirm its value as a form of protest within an increasingly institutionalized society. The figure of the child as an emblem of beleaguered innocence thus became central to the Victorian fictive project.
Download or read book Representations of Masculinity in Literature and Film written by Sara Martín and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-11 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How are men represented on the printed page, the stage and the screen? What do these representations say about masculinity in the past, the present, and the future? The twelve essays in this volume explore the different ways in which men and masculinity have been represented, from the plays of William Shakespeare to the science fiction of Richard K. Morgan, passing through classic fiction by Emily Brontë and Charles Dickens, and popular favourites by Terry Pratchett and Isaac Asimov, without forgetting the Star Wars saga. Collectively, these essays argue that, although much has been written about men, it has been done from a perspective that does not see masculinity as a specific feature in need of critical appraisal. Men need to be made aware of how they are represented in order to alter the toxic patriarchal models handed down to them and even break the extant binary gender models. For that, it is important that men distinguish patriarchy from masculinity, as is done here, and form anti-patriarchal alliances with each other and with women. This book is, then, an invitation to men’s liberation from patriarchy by raising an awareness of its crippling constraints.
Download or read book The Bourgeois Interior written by j Brown and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2012-10-05 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Robinson Crusoe’s cave to Henry Selwyn’s hermitage, the domestic interior tells a story about "things" and their relation to character and identity. Beginning with a description of a typical middle-class interior in America today—noting how its contents echo interiors described in literatures of the past—Julia Prewitt Brown asks why certain features persist, despite radical changes in domestic life over the past three hundred years. The answer lies, Brown argues, in the way the bourgeois interior functions as a medium, a many-layered fabric across which different energies travel, be they psychological, political, or aesthetic. In this way, objects are not symbols but rather the materials out of which symbols are made--symbols that constitute the very soul of the bourgeois. In a wide-ranging analysis, moving from works by Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Henry James to those by Virginia Woolf, Ingmar Bergman, John Updike, and W. G. Sebald, Brown shows that what is at issue is less the economic basis of class than the bourgeoisie’s imagination of itself. The themes explored include the middle class’s ever-increasing desire for more wealth, as well as Victorian women’s identification with the domestic interior and the changes that took place when they began working outside the home. Brown also examines the ambivalence of economically determined objects both as repositories of memory and dreams and as fetishized commodities that become detached from everyday reality. Does the bourgeois possess the interior and its objects, or do the interior and its objects possess the bourgeois?
Download or read book Physiognomy of Capital in Charles Dickens written by Hye-Joon Yoon and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A materialist approach to the fictions of Charles Dickens based on a reading-in of the historical background, creative application of Walter Benjamin's methodology, as well as a re-reading the philological core of the minor works.
Download or read book Dickens s Fiction written by Stanley Friedman and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: British writer Dickens (1812-70) extensively used such reiterative techniques as repetition, paradox, and multiple perspectives to increase the complexity and appeal of his fiction, says Friedman (English, City U. of New York-Queens College). He looks in detail at examples in eight works written at
Download or read book Apprenticeships written by T. Jeffers and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-05-05 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Novels about growing up have long been loved by ordinary readers and analyzed, sometimes with more heat than light, by scholars. This book respects the interests of ordinary readers while clarifying and frequently resolving the moral, psychological, social, and occasionally religious coming-of-age dilemmas that scholars have wrestled with. Focusing on Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Dickens's David Copperfield, James's What Maisie Knew, Forster's The Longest Journey, Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, and Santayana's The Last Puritan, Jeffers writes in a fresh, engaging style meant to give criticism a liveliness and even brilliance it has in recent decades often lacked.
Download or read book Charles Dickens written by James E. Marlow and published by Susquehanna University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Charles Dickens: The Uses of Time clarifies the antinomies that appear in Dickens's attitudes toward the past, present, and future. To do this, author James E. Marlow follows Dickens's personal and literary development through all his novels and many of his letters and journalistic pieces. For example, toward the past Dickens reveals diametrically opposing attitudes. A part of his own childhood was so painful a memory to him that he could not bring himself to tell his wife about it after twenty years of marriage. In his novels he developed a number of ways of dealing with the awful pasts, both personal and national. From denial to anger to acceptance, Dickens tried one method after another. As each failed to relieve his anguish, and even failed to rescue human feelings, he formulated another. This is what Marlow calls Dickens's "dialectic of the past."" "Yet Dickens was also nostalgic about much of the past. He emphasized its softening quality even while trying to disarm its dehumanizing quality. With his characters Dickens discovered the necessity of an engagement with the past that entails accepting the pain as well as the joy. This is its use. The past is abused when the pain or joy is disentangled from the whole and held up as meaning in itself. This act orphans the feelings, petrifying the soul." "What is true of the past is true of the present and future as well. Just as one chapter of the book is devoted to the abuse of the past and another to its uses, a further chapter shows the way Dickens worked through the terrors of the present, dominated by an ideology that the author calls "English cannibalism." Another chapter shows the threat of moral sclerosis through dealing with the future as merely "great expectations." These chapters are paired with chapters that show the joys of the present and future. With each time period there is a dialectical process: Dickens had to work through a stance, discover its deficiencies, and then move on to another stance that promised to provide more human gain, both social and personal, from the past, present, and future. Ultimately, the very existence of three dimensions of time is the solace of man, because while the past, for example, can be used for relief of the present, the present can modify and soften the past. All is fluid, and nothing is ever finished in the process between mind and human events." "In the last chapter Marlow established the kind of material world that Dickens's dialectic of time presupposed. It is a world with moral foundations, and Dickens, like many other Victorians, discovered a plausible, scientific explanation for such a world in Charles Babbage's Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, a book that seeks to harmonize scientific knowledge with moral imperatives. This satisfies Dickens's own project perfectly, for Dickens wished to demonstrate the possibilities of engagements with each dimension of time, within the requirements of social life, that do not annihilate the moral properties necessary for the soul to harmonize with God's universe itself."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book Dickens and Romantic Psychology written by Dink Den and published by Springer. This book was released on 1987-02-23 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
