Download or read book Dissenting Women in Dickens Novels written by Brenda Ayres and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1998-07-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Given their pedagogical nature, many Victorian novels are highly politicized; their narratives are filtered through the value schemes, social views, and conscious purposes of their authors. Victorian women were largely expected to dedicate themselves to the social and moral betterment of their families. Women were expected to be soft, meek, quiet, modest, submissive, gentle, patient, and spiritual; men were supposed to be aggressive, assertive, resilient, disciplined, and competitive. These expectations were repeatedly endorsed through the conduct books of the period, which encouraged people to adhere to proper behavior. The Victorian era also viewed fiction as a didactic tool and as a means to propagate morality. Thus novels of the period typically present women as subordinate to men and as angels of the home. Women who conform to the social norms are usually rewarded in these fictitious worlds, whereas women who violate society's standards are often penalized. Certainly the novels of Charles Dickens fall into the larger didactic trend of Victorian fiction, and like other works of the period, his novels overtly support the conventional values of Victorian society. Dickens typically uses descriptive detail to register approval or disapproval of certain women, and these women are rewarded or chastized through his plots. But on a less obvious level, Dickens also challenges the prevailing Victorian attitude toward women. A close look at his works shows that patriarchs do not automatically deserve the respect they command from their privileged social positions. Women—however virtuous—are unable to produce moral or social change, and many women succeed outside the constraints of domesticity. This book provides a penetrating analysis of how Dickens' novels ultimately fail to promote the conventional Victorian behavioral ideal for women and discusses how his works subvert the domestic ideology of the nineteenth century.
Download or read book Dissenting Women in Dickens Novels written by Brenda Ayres and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1998-07-30 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Given their pedagogical nature, many Victorian novels are highly politicized; their narratives are filtered through the value schemes, social views, and conscious purposes of their authors. Victorian women were largely expected to dedicate themselves to the social and moral betterment of their families. Women were expected to be soft, meek, quiet, modest, submissive, gentle, patient, and spiritual; men were supposed to be aggressive, assertive, resilient, disciplined, and competitive. These expectations were repeatedly endorsed through the conduct books of the period, which encouraged people to adhere to proper behavior. The Victorian era also viewed fiction as a didactic tool and as a means to propagate morality. Thus novels of the period typically present women as subordinate to men and as angels of the home. Women who conform to the social norms are usually rewarded in these fictitious worlds, whereas women who violate society's standards are often penalized. Certainly the novels of Charles Dickens fall into the larger didactic trend of Victorian fiction, and like other works of the period, his novels overtly support the conventional values of Victorian society. Dickens typically uses descriptive detail to register approval or disapproval of certain women, and these women are rewarded or chastized through his plots. But on a less obvious level, Dickens also challenges the prevailing Victorian attitude toward women. A close look at his works shows that patriarchs do not automatically deserve the respect they command from their privileged social positions. Women—however virtuous—are unable to produce moral or social change, and many women succeed outside the constraints of domesticity. This book provides a penetrating analysis of how Dickens' novels ultimately fail to promote the conventional Victorian behavioral ideal for women and discusses how his works subvert the domestic ideology of the nineteenth century.
Download or read book Dickens Dissenting Women written by Brenda Ayres-Ricker and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dickens and the Despised Mother written by Shale Preston and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2013-01-25 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work offers an original interpretation of the mothers of the protagonists in Dickens's autobiographical novels. Taking Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic concept of abjection and Mary Douglas's anthropological analysis of pollution as its conceptual framework, the book argues that Dickens's primary emotional response towards the mother who abandoned him to work in a blacking warehouse was disgust, and suggests that we can trace similar signs of disgust in the narrators of his fictional autobiographies, David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Great Expectations. The author provides a close reading of Dickens's autobiographical fragment and opens up the possibility that Dickens's feelings towards his mother actually bore a significant influence on his fiction. The book closes with a provocative discussion of Dickens's compulsive Sikes and Nancy public readings.
Download or read book Dickens Women written by Charles Dickens and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 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 The Social Problem Novels of Frances Trollope written by Brenda Ayres and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-07-31 with total page 1867 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frances Milton Trollope (1779-1863) was a prolific, provocative and hugely successful novelist. She greatly influenced the generation of Victorian novelists who came after her such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell. This book features Trollope's social problem novels.
Download or read book Dickens Women and Language written by Patricia Ingham and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first full-length study of the treatment of women in Dickens? novels to make use of modern critical approaches. It replaces traditional biographical methods with a new linguistic model which directs attention back to the texts. Patricia Ingham's innovatory approach characterises Dickens? novelistic language by relating it to linguistic representations of women in contemporary non-fictional works (handbooks on womanly conduct, documentary works on prostitution, and Florence Nightingale's Cassandra). This analysis reveals that Dickens? individual account of the womanly ideal is shot through with contradiction. Fallen women are both degraded and valuable, worthless and powerful; ?ideal? women are desirable and undesirable, passive and destructive of the very social structure they are supposed to sustain. The book's conclusion is that the ambiguous struggle between convention and dissent in the language he uses for representing women charges Dickens? novels with their uneasy excitement and power.
Download or read book The Life of the Author Charles Dickens written by Pete Orford and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2023-08-21 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible and reliable introduction to the life and works of Charles Dickens, offering a unique combination of academic biography and literary analysis The Life of the Author: Charles Dickens explores the relationship between Dickens’ lived experience and his works, discussing themes within and key influences on literary classics such as Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Nicholas Nickleby, and Great Expectations. An excellent introduction to the world of Dickens scholarship, this easily accessible volume provides the necessary background about the author’s life while encouraging readers to critically analyze Dickens’ works. Organized thematically by chapter, the book opens with a brief overview of Dickens’ life and a chronology of major works. Subsequent chapters focus on key aspects of Dickens’ life, concluding with case studies of selected texts that demonstrate the similarities between events in Dickens’ own life and the literature he was writing at the time. Throughout the book, readers are provided with an informative portrait of Dickens’ early family life, personal relationships, professional networks, social circles, travels abroad, charitable works, financial issues, dealings with publishers, and much more. Incorporates the latest discussions in Dickens research alongside documents and materials from Dickens’ time Discusses the afterlife of Dickens in film, theater, and television, including A Christmas Carol, Dickens’ most adapted story Features archival material from the Charles Dickens Museum and discussion of Dickens’ roles as a journalist, editor, and professional reader Includes short case studies at the end of each chapter to demonstrate the ways Dickens’ life informed his work The Life of the Author: Charles Dickens is an ideal introductory textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in English Literature and Victorian Literature courses, as well as a valuable resource for Dickens scholars and enthusiasts.
Download or read book The Theological Dickens written by Brenda Ayres and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-18 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first collection to investigate Charles Dickens on his vast and various opinions about the uses and abuses of the tenets of Christian faith that imbue English Victorian culture. Although previous studies have looked at his well-known antipathies toward Dissenters, Evangelicals, Catholics, and Jews, they have also disagreed about Dickens’ thoughts on Unitarianism and speculated on doctrines of Protestantism that he endorsed or rejected. Besides addressing his depiction of these religious groups, the volume’s contributors locate gaps in scholarship and unresolved illations about poverty and charity, representations of children, graveyards, labor, scientific controversy, and other social issues through an investigation of Dickens’ theological concerns. In addition, given that Dickens’ texts continue to influence every generation around the globe, a timely inclusion in the collection is a consideration of the neo-Victorian multi-media representations of Dickens’ work and his ideas on theological questions pitched to a postmodern society.
Download or read book Themes in Dickens written by Peter J. Ponzio and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-03-04 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Victorian age is often portrayed as an era of repressive social mores. Yet this simplified view ignores the context of Great Britain's profound shift, through rapid industrialization, from rural to metropolitan life during this time. Throughout his career, Charles Dickens addressed the numerous changes occurring in Victorian society. His portrayals of organized religion, class distinction, worker's rights, prison reform and rampant poverty resonated with readers experiencing social upheaval. Focusing on his novels, nonfiction writing, speeches and personal correspondence, this book explores Dickens's use of these themes as both literary devices and as a means to effect social progress.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens written by Robert L. Patten and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-13 with total page 848 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens is a comprehensive and up-to-date collection on Dickens's life and works. It includes original chapters on all of Dickens's writing and new considerations of his contexts, from the social, political, and economic to the scientific, commercial, and religious. The contributions speak in new ways about his depictions of families, environmental degradation, and improvements of the industrial age, as well as the law, charity, and communications. His treatment of gender, his mastery of prose in all its varieties and genres, and his range of affects and dramatization all come under stimulating reconsideration. His understanding of British history, of empire and colonization, of his own nation and foreign ones, and of selfhood and otherness, like all the other topics, is explained in terms easy to comprehend and profoundly relevant to global modernity.
Download or read book Women in Journalism at the Fin de Si cle written by F. Gray and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the nineteenth-century drew to a close, women became more numerous and prominent in British journalism. This book offers a fascinating introduction to the work lives of twelve such journalists, and each essay examines the career, writing and strategic choices of women battling against the odds to secure recognition in a male-dominated society.
Download or read book Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies written by R. Patten and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-11-30 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies is a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the study of one of the most important Victorian novelists. Its editors, Robert L. Patten and John Bowen, are leading authorities on Dickens and the international team of contributors they have assembled contains some of the most exciting critics of nineteenth-century fiction writing today. The book covers the whole range of Dickens's writing and criticism about it, including biographical, theoretical and historical approaches. It is based on up-to-the-minute research and written in a lively and engaging way, and will be essential reading for all students and scholars of this canonical writer.
Download or read book New Woman Fiction 1881 1899 Part I Vol 1 written by Carolyn W de la L Oulton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains three early examples of the genre of New Woman writing, each portraying women in ways wholly different to those which had gone before. This title includes "Kith and Kin" (1881), "Miss Brown" and "The Wing of Azrael".
Download or read book Women in Literature written by Jerilyn Fisher and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2003-06-30 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the literary canon consisting mostly of works created by and about men, the central perspective is decidedly male. This unique reference offers alternate approaches to reading traditional literature, as well as suggestions for expanding the canon to include more gender sensitive works. Covering 96 of the most frequently taught works of fiction, essays offer teachers, librarians, and students fresh insights into the female perspective in literature. The list of titles, created in consultation with educators, includes classic works by male authors like Dickens, Faulkner, and Twain, balanced with works by female authors such as Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Also included are contemporary works by writers such as Alice Walker and Margaret Atwood that are being incorporated into the curriculum, as well as those advancing a more global view, such as Sandra Cisneros' House on Mango Street and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. The essays are expertly written in an accessible language that will help students gain greater awareness of gender-related themes. Suggestions for classroom discussions—with selected works for further study—are incorporated into the entries. The volume is organized alphabetically by title and includes both author and subject indexes. An appendix of gender-related themes further enhances this volume's usefulness for curriculum applications and student research projects.
Download or read book Nineteenth Century Narratives of Contagion written by Allan Conrad Christensen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-04-11 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This intriguing book examines the ways contagion - or disease - inform and shape a wide variety of nineteenth century texts and contexts. Christiensen dissects the cultural assumptions concerning disease, health, impurity and so on before exploring different perspectives on key themes such as plague, nursing and the hospital environment and focusing on certain key texts including Dicken's Bleak House, Gaskell's Ruth, and Zola's Le Docteur Pascal.
