Download or read book Dickens and the Trials of Imagination written by Garrett Stewart and published by Cambridge : Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1974 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stewart investigates the fanciful impulse among Dickens's characters, their exchange of semblance for reality, their use of the imagination as a means of retaliating against the fallen Dickensian world.
Download or read book Dickens s Idiomatic Imagination written by Peter J. Capuano and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-15 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dickens's Idiomatic Imagination offers an original analysis of how Charles Dickens's use of "low" and "slangular" (his neologism) language allowed him to express and develop his most sophisticated ideas. Using a hybrid of digital (distant) and analogue (close) reading methodologies, Peter J. Capuano considers Dickens's use of bodily idioms—"right-hand man," "shoulder to the wheel," "nose to the grindstone"—against the broader lexical backdrop of the nineteenth century. Dickens was famously drawn to the vernacular language of London's streets, but this book is the first to call attention to how he employed phrases that embody actions, ideas, and social relations for specific narrative and thematic purposes. Focusing on the mid- to late career novels Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, Capuano demonstrates how Dickens came to relish using common idioms in uncommon ways and the possibilities they opened up for artistic expression. Dickens's Idiomatic Imagination establishes a unique framework within the social history of language alteration in nineteenth-century Britain for rethinking Dickens's literary trajectory and its impact on the vocabularies of generations of novelists, critics, and speakers of English.
Download or read book Dickens and the Trials of Imagination written by Garrett Stewart and published by . This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dickens Imagining Himself written by Morris Golden and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 1992 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Dickens Imagining Himself the author applies biographical materials to analysis of art by examining the way elements in Dicken's life led his imagination to shape his novels. This is a study of how Dickens' self-perceptions guided the patterns of six created worlds at significant points in his life. Contents: What Sort of Consanguinity; Barnaby Rudge: Two Cheers for Maturity; Martin Chuzzlewit: Ambiguously Whittington; David Copperfield: Memory and the Flow of Time; Bleak House: Passing the Bog; Great Expectations: Defining Estella; Our Mutual Friend: Reborn with Galatea; Eclectic Affinities; Notes; Index
Download or read book The Imagined World of Charles Dickens written by Mildred Newcomb and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination written by Sally Ledger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-22 with total page 19 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sally Ledger offers substantial readings of the influences of radical writers on works from Pickwick to Little Dorrit.
Download or read book Dickens and the Short Story written by Deborah A. Thomas and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-11-11 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the height of his career, writing short stories provided Dickens with a release from the formal constraints of his novels and gave free reign to his creative imagination. Ranging from "flights of fancy" to literary masterpieces, Dickens's short stories contained artistic experiments that inspired fuller developments in his novels. Yet the short stories have been all but overlooked in critical discussions. Deborah A. Thomas focuses directly on this body of work, tracing three stages of development. In the early stage until 1840, Dickens produced numerous short stories, culminating in his experience with the abortive Master Humphrey's Clock. In the following ten years, he restricted his writing of short stories to the five Christmas Books but refined his theories about the value of the genre in the context of his work. In the third stage, 1850-1868, Dickens again turned actively to the writing of short stories, many of them the "Christmas Stories" appearing in the weeklies Household Words and All the Year Round, which Dickens edited successively from 1850 to 1869 and from 1859 until his death in 1870. The author concentrates primarily upon the more notable stories, drawing for a perspective upon Dickens' own concept of "fancy." In an increasingly factual age, Dickens—attracted to the unusual and the unknown—found the short story a form in which he could indulge his high degree of fantasy and explore the hidden corners of the mind. Dickens' fascination with psychological abnormality and the supernatural—reflected in his novels—reveals itself even more intriguingly in his short stories. In Thomas's analysis, Dickens' short stories appear as an important key to understanding the novels, while proving worthy in themselves of critical attention. Essential to a thorough study of Dickens, her book sheds light upon previously obscure facets of his developing artistry.
Download or read book Dickens and the Imagined Child written by Peter Merchant and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The figure of the child and the imaginative and emotional capacities associated with children have always been sites of lively contestation for readers and critics of Dickens. In Dickens and the Imagined Child, leading scholars explore the function of the child and childhood within Dickens’s imagination and reflect on the cultural resonance of his engagement with this topic. Part I of the collection examines the Dickensian child as both characteristic type and particular example, proposing a typology of the Dickensian child that is followed by discussions of specific children in Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son, and Bleak House. Part II focuses on the relationship between childhood and memory, by examining the various ways in which the child’s-eye view was reabsorbed into Dickens’s mature sensibility. The essays in Part III focus upon reading and writing as particularly significant aspects of childhood experience; from Dickens’s childhood reading of tales of adventure, they move to discussion of the child readers in his novels and finally to a consideration of his own early writings alongside those that his children contributed to the Gad’s Hill Gazette. The collection therefore builds a picture of the remembered experiences of childhood being realised anew, both by Dickens and through his inspiring example, in the imaginative creations that they came to inform. While the protagonist of David Copperfield-that 'favourite child' among Dickens’s novels-comes to think of his childhood self as something which he 'left behind upon the road of life', for Dickens himself, leafing continually through his own back pages, there can be no putting away of childish things.
Download or read book Dickens s Style written by Daniel Tyler and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-04 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by leading scholars, this collection of essays offers the first comprehensive and accessible book on Dickens's style.
Download or read book Original Copy written by Robert Macfarlane and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-03-08 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: '"Originality" is only plagiarizing from a great many', remarked Rupert Brooke, stealing the line from Voltaire. Questions of originality, and accusations of plagiarism, are as old as literature, but different literary cultures have interpreted the relationship between originality and plagiarism in startlingly dissimilar ways. Original Copy investigates and documents the drastic reappraisal of literary originality and plagiarism which occurred over the course of the nineteenth century: from the heroic visions of original authorship that characterised the 1820s and 1830s, through to the stickle-brick creativity of Oscar Wilde and Lionel Johnson at the century's end. It reveals how ideas of originality and plagiarism were not only a theoretical concern of Victorian commentators on literature, but also provided many important Victorian writers - Eliot, Dickens, Reade, Pater, Wilde, and Lionel Johnson among them - with a creative resource. Moving between numerous different fields of thought and knowledge - literary criticism, the history of science, manuscript culture, anthropology - and written in a supple and elegant style, this book shows that the ideas of originality and plagiarism were the subjects of nineteenth-century literature, as well as what it was subject to.
Download or read book Imagining Otherwise written by Debra Gettelman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-08-13 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Victorian authors engaged the imaginations of their readers and elevated the novel to new heights As novel publication exploded in nineteenth-century Britain, writers such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot learned from experience—sometimes grudgingly—that readers tend to make their own imaginative contributions to fictional worlds. Imagining Otherwise shows how Victorian writers acknowledged, grappled with, and ultimately enlisted the prerogative of readers to conjure alternatives and add depth to the words on the page. Debra Gettelman provides incisive new readings of novels such as Sense and Sensibility, Little Dorrit, and Middlemarch, exploring how novelists known for prescriptive and didactic narrative voices were at the same time exploring the aesthetic potential for the reader’s independent imagination to lend nuance and authenticity to fiction. Modernist authors of the twentieth century have long been considered pioneers in cultivating the reader’s capacity to imagine what is not said as part of the art of fiction. Gettelman uncovers the roots of this tradition of novel reading a century earlier and challenges literary criticism that dismisses this spontaneous, readerly impulse as being unworthy of serious examination. As readers demand novels with relatable characters and fan fiction grows in popularity, the reader’s imagination has become a determining element of today’s literary environment. Imagining Otherwise takes a deeper look at this history, offering a critical perspective on how we came to view fiction as a site of imaginative appropriation.
Download or read book Eros and Psyche Routledge Revivals written by Karen Chase and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does Victorian fiction represent personality? How does it express emotion and how does it imagine the mind? These questions stand at the centre of Eros and Psyche, first published in 1984. In examining how three authors – Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and George Eliot – depict the mind and organise emotion, Chase approaches their works as expressive structures, and analyses their struggle to accommodate rival imperatives in depicting personality: desire and duty, guilt and innocence, love and autonomy. The title begins with Brontë’s early Angrian tales, which introduce the problem that unifies the book: the attempt of Victorian fiction to escape the constraints of the romance mode, while assimilating its energies. There follow readings of The Pickwick Papers, Jane Eyre, Bleak House, and Middlemarch, in the light of such problems as confinement and exposure in Brontë, tragic doubt in Dickens, and the image of the moral mind in George Eliot.
Download or read book The Pleasures of Memory written by Sarah Winter and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2015-08-03 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did this nineteenth-century novelist change the way we think? “A fine contribution to the sociology of literature . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice What are the sources of the commonly held presumption that reading literature should make people more just, humane, and sophisticated? Looking at literary history in relation 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.” Sarah 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 Death Sentences written by Garrett Stewart and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about terminals and boundaries, mortality and closure, the infinitesimals of style and the finite limits of representational language, about least and last things together. It is a book, to start with, about three vast and familiar facts of life and art: death, content, and form. Only by their particular triangulation in the genre of prose fiction do they mark out the hypothesis of the present study: that death in fiction is the fullest instance of form indexing content, is indeed the moment when content, comprising the imponderable of negation and vacancy, can be found dissolving to pure form. Death in narrative yields, by yielding to, sheer style.
Download or read book Text and Culture written by Daniel Cottom and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Text and Culture was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. In Text & Culture, Daniel Cottom examines the political aspects of contemporary disciplines of interpretation. He pleads against limiting the act of reading by disqualifying some readings as "wrong" or unscholarly, and he argues for the necessity of multiple readings, claiming that a closed-off text glosses over differences that are political in nature. He proceeds, then, from the notion of text to culture. Just as the reading of the text is conditioned by irreducible political differences, so is the reading of culture. Finally, to illustrate and further develop his arguments, Cottom presents an extensive analysis of Great Expectations. Cottom's materials range from academic jokes to King Lear, and the writers he discusses range from Kant to Derrida, from Freud to Basil Bernstein, from Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bronislaw Malinowski to Erving Goffman, Clifford Geertz, and Stanley Fish. This study is especially concerned with the way "culture" and related terms, such as "context" and "norm," are part of a larger discourse in the contemporary humanities and social sciences - a discourse in which their effect is to repress recognition of important historical differences, conflicts, and possibilities. At the same time that he shows how difficult it is to get "beyond culture," he tries to indicate how interpretation may be turned into a more socially responsible practice. Daniel Cottom is associate professor of English at the University of Florida. He is the author of Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation (Minnesota, 1987) and The Civilized Imagination: A Study of Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and Sir Walter Scott.
Download or read book Commissioned Spirits written by Jonathan Arac and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 230 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.
