Download or read book Dickensian Laughter written by Malcolm Andrews and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-09-19 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does Dickens make his readers laugh? What is the distinctive character of Dickensian humour? These are the questions explored in this book on a topic that has been strangely neglected in critical studies over the last half century. Dickens's friend and biographer John Forster declared that: 'His leading quality was Humour.' At the end of Dickens's career he was acclaimed as 'the greatest English Humourist since Shakespeare's time.' In 1971 the critic Philip Collins surveyed recent decades of Dickens criticism and asked 'from how many discussions of Dickens in the learned journals would one ever guess that (as Dickens himself thought) humour was his leading quality, his highest faculty?' Forty years later, that rhetorical question has lost none of its force. Why? Perhaps Dickens's genius as a humourist is simply taken for granted, and critics prefer to turn to his other achievements; or perhaps humour is too hard to analyse without spoiling the fun? Whatever the reason, there has been very little by way of sustained critical investigation into what for most people has constituted Dickens's special claim to greatness. This book is framed as a series of essays examining and reflecting on Dickens's techniques for making us laugh. How is it that some written incident, or speech, or narrative 'aside' can fire off the page into the reader's conciousness and jolt him or her into a smile, a giggle, or a hearty laugh? That is the core question here. His first novel, Pickwick Papers, was acclaimed at the time as having 'opened a fresh vein of humour' in English literature: what was the social nature of the humour that established this trademark 'Dickensian' method of making people laugh? And how many kinds of laughter are there in Dickens? What made Dickens himself laugh? Victorian and contemporary theories of laughter can provide useful insights into these processes - incongruity theory or the 'relief' theory of laughter, laughter's contagiousness (laughter as a 'social glue'), the art of comic timing, the neuroscience of laughter. These and other ideas are brought into play in this short book, which considers not only Dickens's novels but also his letters and journalism. And to that end there are copious quotations. The aim of the book is to make readers laugh and also to prompt them to reflect their laughter. It should have an interest not only for Dickensians but for anyone curious about the nature of laughter and how it is triggered.
Download or read book Dickensian Laughter written by Malcolm Andrews and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-09-19 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does Dickens make his readers laugh? What is the distinctive character of Dickensian humour? These are the questions explored in this book on a topic that has been strangely neglected in critical studies over the last half century. Dickens's friend and biographer John Forster declared that: 'His leading quality was Humour.' At the end of Dickens's career he was acclaimed as 'the greatest English Humourist since Shakespeare's time.' In 1971 the critic Philip Collins surveyed recent decades of Dickens criticism and asked 'from how many discussions of Dickens in the learned journals would one ever guess that (as Dickens himself thought) humour was his leading quality, his highest faculty?' Forty years later, that rhetorical question has lost none of its force. Why? Perhaps Dickens's genius as a humourist is simply taken for granted, and critics prefer to turn to his other achievements; or perhaps humour is too hard to analyse without spoiling the fun? Whatever the reason, there has been very little by way of sustained critical investigation into what for most people has constituted Dickens's special claim to greatness. This book is framed as a series of essays examining and reflecting on Dickens's techniques for making us laugh. How is it that some written incident, or speech, or narrative 'aside' can fire off the page into the reader's conciousness and jolt him or her into a smile, a giggle, or a hearty laugh? That is the core question here. His first novel, Pickwick Papers, was acclaimed at the time as having 'opened a fresh vein of humour' in English literature: what was the social nature of the humour that established this trademark 'Dickensian' method of making people laugh? And how many kinds of laughter are there in Dickens? What made Dickens himself laugh? Victorian and contemporary theories of laughter can provide useful insights into these processes - incongruity theory or the 'relief' theory of laughter, laughter's contagiousness (laughter as a 'social glue'), the art of comic timing, the neuroscience of laughter. These and other ideas are brought into play in this short book, which considers not only Dickens's novels but also his letters and journalism. And to that end there are copious quotations. The aim of the book is to make readers laugh and also to prompt them to reflect their laughter. It should have an interest not only for Dickensians but for anyone curious about the nature of laughter and how it is triggered.
Download or read book The Dickensian written by Bertram Waldrom Matz and published by . This book was released on 1907 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter written by James Russell Kincaid and published by Oxford : Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1971 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kincaid argues that the funny Dickens and the "dark" Dickens are one, and that our response to his humour is no less important is Little Dorrit than in Pickwick.
Download or read book Dickensian Affects written by Joshua Gooch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Dickensian Affects: Charles Dickens and Feelings of Precarity, Joshua Gooch argues that Dickens’s novels offer models of feeling that illuminate the dissensions that accompany life’s precariousness under capitalism. By examining the role of violence, anxiety, surprise, and suspense in Dickens’s novels, Gooch explores how they represent and shape emotions to create rhythms specific to their historical moment. To unearth Dickensian affects, Gooch examines how some of Dickens’s novels yoke elements in their difference to signal different kinds and ways of feeling, what he terms affective form. This patterning of elements links a text’s ways of feeling to its conjuncture and locates lines of flight that allow its representations of emotion to become something else. The violence of Oliver Twist links its satire of the New Poor Law to the post-abolition period of apprenticeship in the West Indies. The pervasive anxiety of The Old Curiosity Shop links Nell’s journey to arguments economic inequality focused on questions of inheritance and land reform. The surprise of David Copperfield binds its interests in questions of character and trust to Britain’s professional world and credit markets. And the suspense of Great Expectations gestures toward a sense of shame and demand for new models of masculine character also seen in the Volunteer rifle militias. Dickensian Affects argues that for Dickens, questions of feeling reveal the precarity of feeling itself. For Dickens, to feel is to know the possibility of feeling otherwise.
Download or read book Dickens and the Stenographic Mind written by Hugo Bowles and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-20 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Initially described by Dickens as a 'savage stenographic mystery', shorthand was to become an essential and influential part of his toolkit as a writer. In this ground-breaking interdisciplinary study, Hugo Bowles tells the story of Dickens's stenographic journey from his early encounters with the 'despotic' shorthand symbols of Gurney's Brachygraphy in 1828 to his lifelong commitment to shorthand for reporting, letter writing, copying, and note-taking. Drawing on empirical evidence from Dickens's shorthand notebooks, Dickens and the Stenographic Mind forensically explores Dickens's unique ability to write in two graphic codes, offering an original critique of the impact of shorthand on Dickens's mental processing of language. The author uses insights from morphology, phonetics, and the psychology of reading to show how Dickens's biscriptal habits created a unique stenographic mindset that was then translated into novel forms of creative writing. The volume argues that these new scriptal arrangements, which include phonetic speech, stenographic patterns of letters in individual words, phonaesthemes, and literary representations of shorthand-related acts of reading and writing, created reading puzzles that bound Dickens and his readers together in a new form of stenographic literacy. Clearly written and cogently argued, Dickens and the Stenographic Mind not only opens up new evidence from a little known area of Dickens's professional life to expert scrutiny, but is highly relevant to a number of important debates in Victorian studies including orality and literacy in the nineteenth century, the role of voice and voicing in Dickens's writing process, his relationship with his readers, and his various writing personae as law reporter, sketch-writer, journalist, and novelist.
Download or read book Edinburgh Companion to Charles Dickens and the Arts written by Claire Wood and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-31 with total page 605 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Edinburgh Companion to Charles Dickens and the Arts explores Dickens's rich and complex relationships with a myriad of art forms and the far-reaching resonance of his works across the arts overall. This volume reassesses Dickens's prescient philosophy of art, both through a historical and a present-day lens and in the context of debates about the cultural value of the arts. Across thirty-three original essays, it outlines the ways in which Dickens broke down oppositions between high and low art, money and the aesthetic, the extraordinary and the ordinary, and art for its own sake and the social good. In doing so, it considers how Dickens prefigured the arts of the future, including rap music, television, fanfiction and global cinema.
Download or read book Dickens Death and Christmas written by Robert L. Patten and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-02 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Marley was dead, to begin with." Why does the most beloved of Christmas books open with a death? What has death to do with Christmas and New Years, and with Dickens's Christmas books and stories over his entire life? Robert L. Patten weaves together Dickens's life, career, writings, journalism, travel, theatrical presentations, and religious convictions to offer a richly designed and entertaining narrative, fulsomely illustrated, of the manifold ways Dickensfigures the spirit and traditions of the winter holidays in Victorian England.
Download or read book Simply Dickens written by Paul Schlicke and published by Simply Charly. This book was released on 2016-05-09 with total page 91 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This is one of the best short introductions to Dickens's life and work that I know. Paul Schlicke integrates the life of this extraordinary man with his fiction, journalism, and public readings in a very engaging and lively narrative. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this to the widest range of readers.” —Malcolm Andrews, Emeritus Professor Victorian & Visual Arts, University of Kent, Editor of The Dickensian Oliver Twist. A Christmas Carol. David Copperfield. Bleak House. A Tale of Two Cities. Great Expectations. The novels of Charles Dickens (1812–1870) read like a “Who’s Who” of canonical works. Yet, less well known is the fact that Dickens himself was something of a created character, a larger-than-life figure who lived through his art and pursued his many passions with a theatrical zeal that could have belonged to one of his famous protagonists. Largely self-taught, with little formal education, Dickens was catapulted to fame at the age of 24 with the publication of The Pickwick Papers in 1836. For the next 30 years, he wrote a prodigious number of novels, short stories, essays, and other works, while simultaneously campaigning for a variety of social reforms. As Simply Dickens colorfully describes, in life and in art, Dickens threw himself into everything he undertook—from taking on the personalities of his characters as he wrote, to pursuing such causes as children’s rights and universal education. While some authors have depicted Dickens as a tormented soul or cruel misogynist who compromised his work by pandering to a wide audience, Simply Dickens convincingly shows him as a purposeful, supremely talented, and versatile personality, whose popular appeal was central to his achievement.
Download or read book Dickens Nicholas Nickleby and the Dance of Death written by Jeremy Tambling and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-14 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of Nicholas Nickleby takes the Dickens novel which is perhaps the least critically discussed, though it is very popular, and examines its appeal and its significance, and finds it one of the most rewarding and powerful of Dickens’s texts. Nicholas Nickleby deals with the abduction and destruction of children, often with the collusion of their parents. It concentrates on this theme in a way which continues from Oliver Twist, describing such oppression, and the resistance to it, in the language of melodrama, of parody and comedy. With chapters on the school-system that Dickens attacks, and its grotesque embodiment in Squeers, and with discussion of how the novel reshapes eighteenth century literary traditions, and such topics as the novel’s comedy, and the concept of the ‘humorist’; and ‘theatricality’ and its debt to Carlyle,, the book delves into the way that the novel explores madness within the city in those whose lives have been fractured, or ruined, as so many have been, and considers the symptoms of hypocrisy in the lives of the oppressors and the oppressed alike; taking hypocrisy as a Dickensian subject which deserves further examination. Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance of Death explores ways in which Dickens draws on medieval and baroque traditions in how he analyses death and its grotesquerie, especially drawing on the visual tradition of the ‘dance of death’ which is referred to here and which is prevalent throughout Dickens’s novels. It shows these traditions to be at the heart of London, and aims to illuminate a strand within Dickens’s thinking from first to last. Drawing on the critical theory of Walter Benjamin, Freud, Nietzsche and Marx, and with close detailed readings of such well-known figures as Mrs Nickleby, Vincent Crummles and his theatrical troupe, and Mr Mantalini, and attention to Dickens’s description, imagery, irony, and sense of the singular, this book is a major study which will help in the revaluation of Dickens’s early novels.
Download or read book Best Thoughts of Charles Dickens written by Charles Dickens and published by . This book was released on 1896 with total page 678 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dickens s Clowns written by Jonathan Buckmaster and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-14 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reappraises Dickens's Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi and his imaginative engagement with its principal protagonist.
Download or read book Victorian Comedy and Laughter written by Louise Lee and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-08-06 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative collection of essays is the first to situate comedy and laughter as central rather than peripheral to nineteenth century life. Victorian Comedy and Laughter: Conviviality,Jokes and Dissent offers new readings of the works of Charles Dickens, Edward Lear,George Eliot, George Gissing, Barry Pain and Oscar Wilde, alongside discussions of much-loved Victorian comics like Little Tich, Jenny Hill, Bessie Bellwood and Thomas Lawrence. Tracing three consecutive and interlocking moods in the period, all of the contributors engage with the crucial critical question of how laughter and comedy shaped Victorian subjectivity and aesthetic form. Malcolm Andrews, Jonathan Buckmaster and Peter Swaab explore the dream of print culture togetherness that is conviviality, while Bob Nicholson, Louise Lee, Ann Featherstone,Louise Wingrove and Oliver Double discuss the rise-on-rise of the Victorian joke — both on the page and the stage — while Peter Jones, Jonathan Wild and Matthew Kaiser consider the impassioned debates concerning old and new forms of laughter that took place at the end of the century.
Download or read book A Thousand Gems from Dickens written by Charles Dickens and published by . This book was released on 1889 with total page 674 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Darwin Carlyle Dickens the Fools Jesters and Comic Characters in Shakspeare with Other Essays c written by Samuel Davey and published by . This book was released on 1879 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Fireside Dickens written by Charles Dickens and published by . This book was released on 1883 with total page 666 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Martin Chuzzlewit written by Charles Dickens and published by . This book was released on 1844 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
