Download or read book Charles Dickens Radical Moralist written by Joseph Gold and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Charles Dickens written by Harold Bloom and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Dickens stands as one of the first great popular novelists. Study his classic works, including David Copperfield and Great Expectations.
Download or read book God and Charles Dickens written by Gary Colledge and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 2012-06 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the Christian convictions Charles Dickens held and displayed in his work, bringing the vital faith of an important and vastly popular writer to life.
Download or read book The Scriptures of Charles Dickens written by Vincent Newey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study focuses on Dickens's response to questions of identity, conduct, and social organization that emerged in an era of major cultural unsettlement and change, not least with the decline of religious certainty and the rise of materialism. An analysis of A Christmas Carol as a paradigm of his concerns and strategies in these fields is followed by close readings of novels from different stages of his career, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend. These, and other works by Dickens, are seen to reflect ideologies currently at work in his society but also, more importantly, to participate in the construction of needful value systems and codes for regulating behaviour. Liberal humanism and middle-class hegemony feature largely in this process of culture formation, where Dickens played a crucial role in formulating and promulgating such salient guiding principles as those of sympathy, marriage and the family, economic responsibility, and hierarchy within and between groups. His treatment of the self is on one level driven by this project in shaping and stabilizing attitudes among a confederacy of readers, in that it offers positive models of development, of how to function and fit in; yet on another, especially in his sustained imaginative preoccupation with the figure of the outsider or misfit, this is one pre-eminent area where his writing transcends purposes of enculturation and paradoxically challenges its own ideological positions. His female characters in particular, as well as more obviously his anti-heroes, criminals, and other dissidents, are shown to question and subvert the moulds in which they are formally cast. The novels are confirmed not only as great creative achievements, an aspect this book consistently salutes, nor simply as a primary site of the evolving Victorian dispensation and revolution of ideas, but as a territory that predicts, engages, and illuminates our own complex modernity. Reference is made throughout the volume to other contemporary writings, including sociological, philosophic, and medical discourse, to recent cognate theory, and to traditions, like that of Puritan spiritual autobiography, which Dickens adapted to new ends.
Download or read book Charles Dickens s A Tale of Two Cities written by Harold Bloom and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study guide to Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities," featuring a biographical sketch of the author, a list of characters, summary and analysis, and a selection of critical views.
Download or read book Student Companion to Charles Dickens written by Ruth Glancy and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1999-11-30 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Dickens was the most popular writer of his age and is still considered one of the world's greatest novelists. This well-written study surveys his unusual and prolific life, relating his fiction writings to his concerns and active involvement with social conditions of early Victorian England. Glancy skillfully takes the reader back in time to appreciate the historical settings that inspired works like Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, and A Tale of Two Cities. An entire chapter is devoted to each of these works, as well as to David Copperfield, Hard Times, the Christmas books, and the early novels from The Pickwick Papers to Martin Chuzzlewit. In each chapter Glancy's analysis of plot, style, and character development bring these imaginative stories to life for the reader. This book examines Dickens's keen understanding of human nature and draws out the themes that make works such as A Christmas Carol as beloved today as when first written. This companion to Dickens will aid students in understanding the social context and literary genius of one of the greatest Victorian novelists. The thorough biographical chapter traces Dickens' life from his childhood through the development of his multi-faceted literary career. The literary heritage chapter examines the tremendous influence Dickens exerted on writing then and now. This volume surveys all of Dickens' work and provides in-depth readings of five of his novels and his Christmas works. The series format makes analysis of setting, plot, character development, and themes for each work accessible to students. The alternate critical perspectives enhance readers' understanding of Dickens' work. The selected bibliography and reviews cover both original and contemporary sources.
Download or read book A Study Guide for Charles Dickens s Oliver Twist written by Gale, Cengage Learning and published by Gale, Cengage Learning . This book was released on 2016-06-29 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Study Guide for Charles Dickens's "Oliver Twist," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
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 Innocent Abroad written by Jerome Meckier and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1842, Victorian England's foremost novelist visited America, naively expecting both a return to Eden and an ideal republic that would demonstrate progress as a natural law. Instead, Charles Dickens suffered a traumatic disappointment that darkened his vision of society and human nature for the remainder of his career. His second tour, in 1867-68, ostensibly more successful, proved no antidote for the first. Using new materials—letters, diaries, and publishers' records—Jerome Meckier enumerates the reasons for the failure of Dickens's American tours. During the first, an informal conspiracy of newspaper editors frustrated his call for copyright protection. More important, he grew less equalitarian and more British daily, a disillusioned novelist discovering his true self. His American Notes (1842) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44) repudiated travel books by Tocqueville, Mrs. Trollope, and Martineau that had either viewed America as civilization's new dawn or voiced insufficient reservations. Having plumbed man's tainted hear abroad, the creator of Mr. Pickwick saw everything more satirically at home: he became a radical pessimist, a dedicated reformer who nevertheless ruled out a utopian future. Dickens's return visit, the reading tour intended to make his fortune, was an ironic second coming. Thanks to poor planning and management, ticket scalpers benefited as greatly as the much-lionized performer. Meckier argues that Dickens's business dealings with his American publishers were neither as smooth nor as lucrative as legend holds, but that the novelist's health problems and his eagerness to bring along his mistress have been much exaggerated. In fascinating counterpoint, Meckier charts the ticket speculators' systematic successes, the ups and downs of Dickens's catarrh, and the steady inroads he made into the heart of Annie Fields, his American publisher's young wife. This critical/biographical study reshapes our view of the life and career of the giant of Victorian Literatures.
Download or read book A Tale of Two Cities written by Ruth F. Glancy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-23 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1993. This annotated bibliography covers all material relating to A Tale o f Two Cities from Dickens’s first hints of it in his Book o f Memoranda to critical studies published in 1991. It is divided into three main parts: “Text,” “Studies,” and “Selected Bibliography.”
Download or read book The Victorian Comic Spirit written by Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-22 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title was first published in 2000: "Comedy" and "humour" are not words most associate with the Victorian period, yet their culture was rife with laughter and irony. The 12 essays in this volume reanimate this "comic spirit" by exploring the humour in its social context. While previous studies of humour in the period focus on the age's own ongoing interest in the old distinction in comic theory between wit and humour, this volume aims to show how inadequate this distinction is in accounting for the many types of Victorian comic representation. The essays turn from linguistic or psychological analyses of humour towards the social production of humour and the cultural dynamics which underlie it.
Download or read book Literary History of Canada written by Carl F. Klinck and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1976-12-15 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed as a landmark in Canadian literary scholarship when it was originally published in 1965, the Literary History of Canada is now being reissued, revised and enlarged, in three volumes. This major effort of a large group of scholars working in the field of English-language Canadian literature provides a comprehensive, up-to-date reference work. It has already proven itself invaluable as a source of information on authors, genres, and literary trends and influences. It represents a positive attempt to give a history of Canada in terms of writings which deserve attention because of significant thought, form, and use of language. Volume 3 has been newly written for this edition of the History, and covers the years from about 1960 to 1974. The contributors to this volume are Claude Bissell, Desmond Pacey, Lauriat Lane, jr, Michael S. Cross, Thomas A. Goudge, John Webster Grant, John H. Chapman, William E. Swinton, Henry B. Mayo, Malcolm Ross, Brandon Conron, Clara Thomas, Sheila A. Egoff, John Ripley, William H. New, George Woodcock, and Northrop Frye.
Download or read book Sex Crime and Literature in Victorian England written by Ian Ward and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-11-01 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Victorians worried about many things, prominent among their worries being the 'condition' of England and the 'question' of its women. Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England revisits these particular anxieties, concentrating more closely upon four 'crimes' which generated especial concern amongst contemporaries: adultery, bigamy, infanticide and prostitution. Each engaged questions of sexuality and its regulation, legal, moral and cultural, for which reason each attracted the considerable interest not just of lawyers and parliamentarians, but also novelists and poets and perhaps most importantly those who, in ever-larger numbers, liked to pass their leisure hours reading about sex and crime. Alongside statutes such as the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act and the 1864 Contagious Diseases Act, Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England contemplates those texts which shaped Victorian attitudes towards England's 'condition' and the 'question' of its women: the novels of Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot, the works of sensationalists such as Ellen Wood and Mary Braddon, and the poetry of Gabriel and Christina Rossetti. Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England is a richly contextual commentary on a critical period in the evolution of modern legal and cultural attitudes to the relation of crime, sexuality and the family.
Download or read book Sir Philip Gibbs and English Journalism in War and Peace written by Martin C. Kerby and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-03-16 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sir Philip Gibbs was one of the most widely read English journalists of the first half of the twentieth century. This coverage of his writing offers a broad insight into British social and political developments, government and press relations, propaganda, and war reporting during the First World War.
Download or read book Finite Contingent and Free written by Joyce Kloc McClure and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2003 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finite, Contingent, and Free is a Roman Catholic perspective that views acceptance as the proper response to the conditions of human existence, and the foundation for ethics.
Download or read book The Political Lives of Victorian Animals written by Anna Feuerstein and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-04 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines how liberal thought influenced representations of animals within nineteenth-century animal welfare discourse and the Victorian novel.
